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The Andrej Karpathy episode.

During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into the previous ~2.5 centuries of 2% GDP growth, why self driving took so long to crack, and what he sees as the future of education.

It was a pleasure chatting with him.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) – AGI is still a decade away

(00:29:45) – LLM cognitive deficits

(00:40:05) – RL is terrible

(00:49:38) – How do humans learn?

(01:06:25) – AGI will blend into 2% GDP growth

(01:17:36) – ASI

(01:32:50) – Evolution of intelligence & culture

(01:42:55) - Why self driving took so long

(01:56:20) - Future of education

As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter.

Microsoft is building multiple Fairwaters, each of which has hundreds of thousands of GB200s & GB300s. Between all these interconnected buildings, they’ll have over 2 GW of total capacity. Just to give a frame of reference, even a single one of these Fairwater buildings is more powerful than any other AI datacenter that currently exists.

Satya then answered a bunch of questions about how Microsoft is preparing for AGI across all layers of the stack.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

Sponsors

* Labelbox produces high-quality data at massive scale, powering any capability you want your model to have. Whether you’re building a voice agent, a coding assistant, or a robotics model, Labelbox gets you the exact data you need, fast. Reach out at labelbox.com/dwarkesh

* CodeRabbit automatically reviews and summarizes PRs so you can understand changes and catch bugs in half the time. This is helpful whether you’re coding solo, collaborating with agents, or leading a full team. To learn how CodeRabbit integrates directly into your workflow, go to coderabbit.ai

To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Fairwater 2

(00:03:20) - Business models for AGI

(00:12:48) - Copilot

(00:20:02) - Whose margins will expand most?

(00:36:17) - MAI

(00:47:47) - The hyperscale business

(01:02:44) - In-house chip & OpenAI partnership

(01:09:35) - The CAPEX explosion

(01:15:07) - Will the world trust US companies to lead AI?

Read the essay here.

Timestamps

00:00:00 What are we scaling?

00:03:11 The value of human labor

00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post shifting is justified

00:08:23 RL scaling

00:09:18 Broadly deployed intelligence explosion

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a century.

This lecture was particularly interesting to me because, in my opinion, the Chinese Civil War is 1 of the top 3 most important events of the 20th century. And to understand why it transpired as it did, you need to understand Stalin’s role in the whole thing.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

Sponsors

Mercury helps you run your business better. It’s the banking platform we use for the podcast — we love that we can see our cash balance, AR, and AP all in one place. Join us (and over 200,000 other entrepreneurs) at mercury.com

Labelbox scrutinizes public benchmarks at the single data-row level to probe what’s really being evaluated. Using this knowledge, they can generate custom training data for hill climbing existing benchmarks, or design new benchmarks from scratch. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkesh

To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – How Russia took advantage of China’s weakness

(00:22:58) – After Stalin, China’s rise

(00:33:52) – Russian imperialism

(00:45:23) – China’s and Russia’s existential problems

(01:04:55) – Q&A: Sino-Soviet Split

(01:22:44) – Stalin’s lessons from WW2

In an era devoid of accountability for the Epstein class and sports owners (and in-between), Pablo finds a kindred spirit in the OG blogger turned ESPN insider turned fellow independent muckraker who's not afraid to call out the backroom dynamics of Adam Silver during wartime: If billionaires can't police themselves, does cheating matter? Do the people who run the sport... really love the sport? If there's no effort to be decent, where do the lies end? And if Steve Ballmer's already negotiating, what is his minimum viable punishment?

• Previously on PTFO: Ballmer's Tree-Money, the Whistle-Blowers and the Document You've Been Waiting For

• "Bron got me on sea bass"

• Subscribe to TrueHoop by Henry Abbott

(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.)

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What happens when a career grifter tries to throw a "luxury" music festival in only six months? Not much it turns out.This was the Fyre Festival.

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