Dwarkesh Podcast

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

May 22, 2026

New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.Reiner is CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency, compilers, and TPU architecture.Watch this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. Read the transcript.Sponsors* Crusoe was one of only five GPU cl...

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

May 15, 2026

Eric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools.Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play. You have to go back to 2017 to get insight into how the more general AIs of the future might learn.Once he explained how AlphaGo works, it gave us the context to have a discussion about how RL works in LLMs and how it c...

David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution

May 08, 2026

David Reich is back.He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution.By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up.Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago).That’s when gene frequencies for everything from immune function t...