Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Patel lived in India in his early years and came to the United States with his family as a child, living in several states before enrolling at the University of Texas at Austin to study computer science.⁠[1]

In college, he broadened his interests by reading books on economics and history and began reaching out to authors. After reading Bryan CaplanBryan CaplanBryan Caplan (Bryan D. Caplan) is an American economist and professor of economics at George Mason University whose fields include public economics, public choice and psychology and economics; he has written several books on economics and public policy.Open the full entry’s The Case Against Education, he emailed Caplan to express his interest in the book and then invited him for an interview.⁠[1]

On May 22, 2020, Patel released an interview with the economist Bryan Caplan, which the episode page marks as the podcast’s first episode. At the time, he was producing the show, called The Lunar Society, from his college dorm, discussing education, economics, and social issues.⁠[2][1]

On July 10 of the same year, he released an interview with Tyler CowenTyler CowenTyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University and chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center; in 2003 he co-founded the economics blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, he has written books including The Great Stagnation and Stubborn Attachments, and he hosts the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2021.Open the full entry covering economic growth, education, history, and social change. These early episodes unfolded as long-form conversations and were offered as audio, video, or text.⁠[3]

In December 2021, Patel graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in computer science. At graduation, he was still looking for a long-term career direction.⁠[1][4]

He later wrote in a review of his work that an early listener, Anil Varanasi, gave him a $10,000 grant that allowed him to work full time on the podcast and writing for six months; he later received another small grant. Even while continuing the show, he at one point considered ending the podcast to start a company.⁠[4]

On March 27, 2023, Patel released an interview with Ilya SutskeverIlya SutskeverIlya Sutskever is a computer scientist who studied under Geoffrey Hinton, helped develop AlexNet and sequence-to-sequence learning, and is a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI. As a board member in 2023 he took part in removing Sam Altman, and after leaving OpenAI in 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence, which he has led as CEO since 2025.Open the full entry, then chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, covering artificial general intelligence, next-generation models, AI alignment, and competition among technology companies.⁠[5]

Patel said in a later interview that, to prepare for this conversation, he implemented a Transformer himself. He regards extended reading and technical preparation as an important part of his interviewing method.⁠[1]

On April 18, 2024, Patel released an interview with Meta CEO Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, centered on Llama 3, open models, custom chips, synthetic data, and the energy constraints on scaling compute.⁠[6]

Looking back on this interview in 2025, Patel said that negotiating ads around the episode made him realize that revenue could support full-time editors and that the podcast could become a long-term business.⁠[7]

In August 2024, Patel wrote in “Dwarkesh Podcast Progress Update” that when choosing guests he cares more about whether he is willing to spend two weeks researching their field than about whether the guest is well known. He cited his episodes with the historian Sarah Paine as an example showing that specialist scholars can also attract wide attention.⁠[4]

He also discussed how advertising, editing, and coordinating recordings took time away from research, and hoped to free up more time for reading and writing by dividing up the work. He believes that continuous learning and forming his own questions and judgments are the foundation for improving the show’s quality.⁠[4]

In September 2024, Patel was named to TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry’s TIME100 AI list. The profile focused on his technical interviews and advance research, and also mentioned criticism that such podcasts are relatively friendly to tech leaders and do not push back hard enough.⁠[8]

On March 25, 2025, Stripe Press announced the ebook release of The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 and opened preorders for the print edition. Compiled by Patel and Gavin Leech, the book draws on the podcast’s interviews to present discussions of AI development during this period.⁠[9]

The book collects conversations with guests including Dario AmodeiDario AmodeiDario Amodei is an artificial intelligence researcher and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic. Trained in physics and biophysics, he conducted research at Baidu, Google Brain, and OpenAI, where he led research including work on GPT-2 and GPT-3. His career spans large-model development, AI safety, interpretability, and public policy.Open the full entry, Demis HassabisDemis HassabisDemis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, co-founder of DeepMind and its CEO and that of Google DeepMind from 2010 to 2026, and since then Chair of Google DeepMind, Chief Scientist of Alphabet and CEO of Isomorphic Labs; a former chess prodigy and game designer, he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction, and has appeared twice on the Lex Fridman Podcast.Open the full entry, Ilya Sutskever, and Mark Zuckerberg, covering model scaling, alignment, compute, and economic and social impact; the publisher added glossary explanations, diagrams, and supplementary material to the interviews.⁠[10]

In a Q&A episode from the same period, Patel said that when choosing guests he considers whether he is willing to spend one to two weeks reading their work and understanding their research, rather than considering only their influence.⁠[7]

On June 2, 2025, Patel published “Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner,” drawing on his own attempts to use language models for podcast post-production work to argue that a lack of continual learning ability would limit models’ capacity to take on complex work.⁠[11]

He distinguished between completing a single task and the ability to absorb feedback and accumulate work experience over time, and acknowledged that reasoning models and coding tools had improved. He framed the timeline forecasts in the piece as personal judgments with great uncertainty.⁠[11]

On April 15, 2026, Patel released an interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen HuangJensen HuangJensen Huang is the co-founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA and has served on its board since the company was founded in 1993. He has a background in electrical engineering education and the semiconductor industry, and under his leadership NVIDIA’s business expanded from graphics chips to GPU general-purpose computing, artificial intelligence, and data center computing platforms.Open the full entry, pressing him on Nvidia’s supply chain advantages, TPU competition, its choices about cloud computing businesses, and its investments in AI companies.⁠[12]

The two also discussed selling AI chips to China. Patel said he did not yet have a settled position and raised counterarguments from the perspective of national security risks, while Huang laid out his position in favor of having developers worldwide use the American technology stack.⁠[12]

On September 11, 2026, Patel discussed recursive self-improvement, generalization, and research automation with John Schulman, Beren Millidge, and Charlie O’Neill. The episode used a multi-person conversation to present the researchers’ judgments and disagreements on these questions.⁠[13]

On September 17, he released an interview with Noam BrownNoam BrownNoam Brown is a research scientist at OpenAI who works on reasoning, reinforcement learning, self-play, and multi-agent AI. The poker programs Libratus and Pluribus, which he developed with his advisor Tuomas Sandholm, defeated top professional players; at Meta he helped develop CICERO, an AI for the game Diplomacy; and at OpenAI he was a foundational contributor to reasoning models such as o1.Open the full entry, covering multi-agent collaboration, research automation, and how to judge whether a model is aligned.⁠[14]

Patel’s official website is https://www.dwarkesh.com (opens in a new window), and his X account is @dwarkesh_sp (https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp (opens in a new window)). Dwarkesh Podcast is also published on YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.⁠[15][16]

His representative works include the long-form interview show Dwarkesh Podcast and The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025, created with Gavin Leech.⁠[10]