Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory

Dwarkesh Podcast

Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive.

In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed.

After the episode, I convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he's up to. Please go here to contribute.

Read the full transcript here.

Sponsors:

* Jane Street is looking to hire their next generation of leaders. Their deep learning team is looking for ML researchers, FPGA programmers, and CUDA programmers. Summer internships are open - if you want to stand out, take a crack at their new Kaggle competition. To learn more, go here: https://jane-st.co/dwarkesh

* Turing provides complete post-training services for leading AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Gemini. They specialize in model evaluation, SFT, RLHF, and DPO to enhance models’ reasoning, coding, and multimodal capabilities. Learn more at turing.com/dwarkesh.

* This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.

If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Anonymity

00:01:09 - Automating Steve Jobs

00:04:38 - Isaac Newton's theory of progress

00:06:36 - Grand theory of intelligence

00:10:39 - Seeing scaling early

00:21:04 - AGI Timelines

00:22:54 - What to do in remaining 3 years until AGI

00:26:29 - Influencing the shoggoth with writing

00:30:50 - Human vs artificial intelligence

00:33:52 - Rabbit holes

00:38:48 - Hearing impairment

00:43:00 - Wikipedia editing

00:47:43 - Gwern.net

00:50:20 - Counterfactual careers

00:54:30 - Borges & literature

01:01:32 - Gwern's intelligence and process

01:11:03 - A day in the life of Gwern

01:19:16 - Gwern's finances

01:25:05 - The diversity of AI minds

01:27:24 - GLP drugs and obesity

01:31:08 - Drug experimentation

01:33:40 - Parasocial relationships

01:35:23 - Open rabbit holes

Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe