5 ms·

Zuck has an interview out for it as well, https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1780990840179187715 https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1780990840179187715

• deleted 2y ago
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• chaoz_ 2y ago
  I can't express how good Dwarkesh's podcast is in general.
  • lordswork 2y ago
    Lex walked so that Dwarkesh could run. He runs the best AI podcast around right now, by a long shot.
    • aster0id 2y ago
      I agree that it is the best AI podcast. I do have a few gripes though, which might just be from personal preference. A lot of the time the language used by both the host and the guests is unnecessarily obtuse. Also the host is biased towards being optimistic about LLMs leading to AGI, and so he doesn't probe guests deep enough about that, more than just asking something along the lines of "Do you think next token prediction is enough for AGI?". Most of his guests are biased economically or academically to answer yes. This is then taken as the premise of the discussion following. Having said that, I do agree that it is much better and deeper than other podcasts about AI.
      • Smaug123 2y ago
        I struggle to blame people for speaking in whatever way is most natural to them, when they're answering hard questions off the cuff. "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one."
      • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
        There's a difference to being a good chatshow/podcast host and a journalist holding someone's feet to the fire! Dwarkesh is excellent at what he does - lots of research beforehand (which is how he lands these great guests), but then lets the guest do most of the talking, and encourages them to expand on what they are saying. It you are critisizing the guest or giving them too much push back, then they are going to clam up and you won't get the best out of them.
        • mrtranscendence 2y ago
          I haven't listened to Dwarkesh, but I take the complaint to mean that he doesn't probe his guests in interesting ways, not so much that he doesn't criticize his guests. If you aren't guiding the conversation into interesting corners then that seems like a problem.
          • aster0id 2y ago
            Agree
          • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
            He does a lot of research before his interviews, so comes with a lot of good questions, but then mostly let's the guests talk. He does have some impromptu follow-ups, but mostly tries to come back to his prepared questions. A couple of his interviews I'd recommend: - Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlkk3glap_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlkk3glap_U - Richard Rhodes (Manhatten project, etc - history of Atom bomb) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMdMiYsfHKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMdMiYsfHKo
        • zargon 2y ago
          I decided to listen to a Dwarkesh episode as a result of this thread. I chose the Eliezer Yudkowsky episode. After 90 minutes, Dwarkesh is raising one of the same 3 objections for the n-teenth time, instead of leading the conversation in an interesting direction. If his other AI episodes are in the vein as other comments describe, then this does seem to be plain old positive AGI optimism bias rather than some special interview technique. In addition, he's very ill-prepared in that he doesn't seem to have attempted to understand the reasons some people have for believing AGI to be a threat. On the other hand, Yudkowsky was a terrible guest, in terms of his public speaking skills. He came across as combative. His answers were terse and he spent little time on background information or otherwise making an effort to explain his reasoning in a way more digestible for a general audience.
      • chaoz_ 2y ago
        but do you think "next token prediction is enough for AGI" though?
        • aster0id 2y ago
          I think AGI is less a "generation" problem and more a "context retrieval" problem. I am an outsider looking in to the field, though, so I might be completely wrong.
    • mrtranscendence 2y ago
      I don't know Dwarkesh but I despise Lex Fridman. I don't know how a man that lacks the barest modicum of charisma has propelled himself to helming a high-profile, successful podcast. It's not like he tends to express interesting or original thoughts to make up for his paucity of presence. It's bizarre. Maybe I'll check out Dwarkesh, but even seeing him mentioned him in the same breath as Fridman gives me pause ...
      • chaoz_ 2y ago
        I agree with you so much, but he has a solid programmatic approach, where some of the guests uncover. Maybe that's the whole role of an interviewer.
      • forrestthewoods 2y ago
        The question you should ask is: why are high-profile guests willing to talk to Lex Fridman but not others? The short answer, imho, is trust. No one gets turned into an embarrassing soundbite talking to Lex. He doesn't try to ask gotcha questions for clickbait articles. Generally speaking "the press" are not your friend and they will twist your words. You have to walk on egg shells. Lex doesn't need to express original ideas. He needs to get his guests to open up and share their unique perspectives and thoughts. He's been extremely successful in this. An alternative question is why hasn't someone more charismatic taken off in this space? I'm not sure! Who knows, there might be some lizard brain secret sauce behind the "flat" podcast host.
        • lordswork 2y ago
          My earlier comparison was basically saying now that high-profile guests are talking to a much better interviewer (Dwarkesh), we no longer have to rely on Lex as the only podcast with long-form interviews of these guests.
        • octodog 2y ago
          Yes, of course. His guests love being able to come on and present their view with very little critical analysis of what they are saying. It is fantastic PR for them. Interviewers shouldn't be aggressive, antagonistic or clickbaity but they should put opposing views to their guests so that the guest can respond. Testing ideas like this is a fundamental way of learning and establishing an understanding of a topic.
    • chaoz_ 2y ago
      indeed my thoughts, especially with first Dario Amodei's interview. He was able to ask all the right questions and discussion was super fruitful.
    • bearjaws 2y ago
      I feel like Lex has gone full 'both sides' at this point, waiting for him to have Alex Jones on at this point. There is no real commentary to pull from his interviews, at best you get some interesting stories but not the truth.
      • bigstrat2003 2y ago
        That is a strength, not a weakness. It's valuable to see why people, even those with whom we disagree, think the way they do. There's already far too much of a tendency to expel heretics in today's society, so the fact that Lex just patiently listens to people is a breath of fresh air.
        • Workaccount2 2y ago
          I felt that way until he had Carlson on. Carlson is a grade A TV talking head grifter who just spins up sensationalist narratives to drive views. No background, no expertise, just a guy who mastered which buttons to push to get average joe's raging. Lex says he wants open honest conversation, but Carlson was just doing the same stunningly dishonest grift he does every time he has a mic in front of him. So dumb.
        • glenstein 2y ago
          >That is a strength, not a weakness The trouble is self-styled "both sides" types believe that since they take the both sides approach, they have insulated themselves from the kinds of politicization that compromises the extremes. But the manner in which you position yourself relative to those extremes is every bit as politicized and every bit as liable to the same cognitive biases and rationalizations. Misinformed climate skeptics often regard themselves in this way, as not taking one side or the other on global warming. They mistakenly believe that this orientation has elevated them above equivalently offensive extremes, but in truth they have compromised their own media literacy by orienting themselves in that manner. There are numerous instances of this all over the political spectrum, Cornell West talking to left-wing academics in left-wing academic language about how "nobody" thinks Obama is truly left-wing. Journalists during the Iraq war had a both sides approach that cashed out as extremely hawkish and apologetic in defense of the Iraq war. The Lex Friedman version is a "centrist" in a specific kind of media environment that lends disproportionate visibility towards its own set of boutique topics. The combination of optimism about technology and trends especially around AI and crypto and some libertarian leaning politics surrounding it, which at its periphery finds itself disproportionately saturated by right-wing memeing and politics. And so it's a form of centerism that's in the center of a world as described by those things. But for him and his viewers it's something they consider a perfectly neutral state of nature that's free of any adornment of ideology.
• paxys 2y ago
  Very interesting part around 5 mins in where Zuck says that they bought a shit ton of H100 GPUs a few years ago to build the recommendation engine for Reels to compete with TikTok (2x what they needed at the time, just to be safe), and now they are accidentally one of the very few companies out there with enough GPU capacity to train LLMs at this scale.
  • lordswork 2y ago
    TikTok (ByteDance) is now building an AGI team to train and advance LLMs (towards AGI), probably after realizing they are in a similar scenario.
    • Workaccount2 2y ago
      I don't know how they think they are going to get the required number of GPU's through export controls.
      • alsodumb 2y ago
        Are the export controls to China geographically or any Chinese majority-owned entity? Either way, ByteDance has tons of offices everywhere in the world including Singapore, US, etc. Given the money, I don't think GPU access wouldn't be their biggest problem.
  • Solvency 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • cornholio 2y ago
    The only thing the Reels algorithm is showing me are videos of ladies with fat butts. Now, I must admit, I may have clicked once on such a video. Should I now be damned to spend an eternity in ass hell?
    • originalvichy 2y ago
      I could have saved them a lot of money by revealing to them that, yes, heterosexual men tend to gravitate towards ladies with fat butts. I have a hunch that some of the more professional folks there game the algorithm. If you ever wanna find a place where people share algo optimization secrets, it’s OF creators on reddit.
• modeless 2y ago
  Seems like a year or two of MMA has done way more for his charisma than whatever media training he's done over the years. He's a lot more natural in interviews now.
  • ativzzz 2y ago
    Intense exercise, especially a competetive sport where you train with other people tends to do this
    • zarzavat 2y ago
      There is something especially confidence building about training martial arts, I personally believe it adjusts our fight-flight response, which is also kicking in in social situations. It’s not just training with other people but becoming used to receiving physical insult, it dampens our baseline fear of physical attack that we all feel in our factory default configuration.
  • freedomben 2y ago
    I've noticed the same thing! I think the personal confidence you build training hard MMA is a lot more empowering than the presonal confidence you build from making billions of dollars and being CEO of a gigantic company. For those of us without the money, it seems hard to believe, but people are people even when they're rich, and I've seen MMA change a lot of people in the same way.
    • meiraleal 2y ago
      Zuckerberg looks like a little kid around Alex Poatan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alr9HkSSyAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alr9HkSSyAc
  • ww520 2y ago
    MMA has a way to humble anyone. It's a great way to train for body and mind.
  • internet101010 2y ago