Comment by bugglebeetle 3 days ago
Dwarkesh has a CS degree, but zero academic training or real world experience in deep learning, so all of his blogging is just secondhand bullshitting to further siphon off a veneer of expertise from his podcast guests.
Better to be honest than say nothing, plenty of people say nothing. I asked a polite question thats near-impossible to answer without that level of honesty.
I thought your question was great. I read the Dwarkesh post as scratch space for working out his thinking - so, closer to a shower thought. But also, an attempt to do what he’s really great at, which is distill and summarize at a “random engineer” level of complexity.
You can kind of hear him pull in these extremely differing views on the future from very different sources, try and synthesize them, and also come out with some of his own perspective this year - I think it’s interesting. At the very least, his perspective is hyper-informed - he’s got fairly high-trust access to a lot of decision makers and senior researchers - and he’s smart and curious.
This year we’ve had him bring in the 2027 folks (AI explosion on schedule), Hinton (LLMs are literally divorced from reality, and a total dead-end), both Ilya (we probably need emotions for super intelligence, also I won’t tell you my plan), Karpathy and Dario (Dario maybe twice?), Gwen, all with very very different perspectives on what’s coming and why.
So, I think if you read him as one of the chroniclers of this era his own take is super interesting, and he’s in a position to be of great use precisely at synthesizing and (maybe) predicting; he should keep it up.
I teach and mentor lots of folks in my world. What I don’t do is feign expertise to rub shoulders with the people doing the actual work so I can soak money from rubes with ad rolls.
So grumpy! Please pick up the torch and educate the world better; it can only help.