AMA ft. Sholto & Trenton: New Book, Career Advice Given AGI, How I'd Start From Scratch
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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Today, this is gonna be an Ask Me Anything episode. I'm joined with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. You guys do some AI stuff. Right? Yeah.
Double.
They're researchers at Anthropic. Other news, I have a book launching today. It's called A Scaling Era. Yeah. I hope one of the questions ends up being why you should buy this book. But we can come two birds with one stone. But, okay. Let's just get at it. What's the first question that we gotta answer? Take
it away.
So I wanna ask the fly ball question that I heard before of why should ordinary people care about this book? Like like, why should my mom buy and read the book? Yeah.
First, let me tell you about the book, what it is. So, you know, these last few years, I've been interviewing AI Lab CEOs, researchers, people like you guys, obviously, but also scholars from all kinds of different fields, economists, philosophers. And they've been addressing, I think, what are basically the gnarliest, most interesting, most important questions we've ever had to ask ourselves. Like, what is the fundamental nature of intelligence? What will happen when we have billions of extra workers? How do we echo how do we model out the economics of that? How do we think about an intellige
I I do like how the book is sliced up by different topics Yes. And across interviews. Yeah. Yeah. So it it does seem like a nice way to listen to all of the interviews in in one digestible way.
There's, two interviews I've done that haven't been released publicly before that are in the book. So one was with Jared Kaplan, who's one of your cofounders. And this is another example where it's like, he's like a physicist, and he's explaining scaling from this, like, very mathematical perspective about data manifolds. And then on the same next page, you have, like, a totally different perspective. It's like Goran talking about, you know, why why can't we just have, like, distilled like, why did general intelligence actually evolve in the first place? What is the actual evolutionary purpose
The the only other thing that stood out to me as well is the introduction section. I only did it stood
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