Based on my essay about AI firms.

Huge thanks to Petr and his team for bringing this to life!

Watch on YouTube.

Thanks to Google for sponsoring. We used their Veo 2 model to make this entire video—it generated everything from the photorealistic humans to the claymation octopuses. If you’re a Gemini Advanced user, you can try Veo 2 now in the Gemini app. Just select Veo 2 in the dropdown, and type your video idea in the prompt bar. Get started today by going to gemini.google.com.

To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.

Zuck on:

* Llama 4, benchmark gaming

* Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI

* DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump

* Orion glasses, AI relationships, and preventing reward-hacking from our tech.

Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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SPONSORS

* Scale is building the infrastructure for safer, smarter AI. Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, while their public leaderboards help assess model capabilities. They also just released Scale Evaluation, a new tool that diagnoses model limitations. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn how Scale can help you push the frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh.

* WorkOS Radar protects your product against bots, fraud, and abuse. Radar uses 80+ signals to identify and block common threats and harmful behavior. Join companies like Cursor, Perplexity, and OpenAI that have eliminated costly free-tier abuse by visiting workos.com/radar.

* Lambda is THE cloud for AI developers, with over 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs ready to go for startups, enterprises, and hyperscalers. By focusing exclusively on AI, Lambda provides cost-effective compute supported by true experts, including a serverless API serving top open-source models like Llama 4 or DeepSeek V3-0324 without rate limits, and available for a free trial at lambda.ai/dwarkesh.

To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/p/advertise.

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TIMESTAMPS

(00:00:00) – How Llama 4 compares to other models

(00:11:34) – Intelligence explosion

(00:26:36) – AI friends, therapists & girlfriends

(00:35:10) – DeepSeek & China

(00:39:49) – Open source AI

(00:54:15) – Monetizing AGI

(00:58:32) – The role of a CEO

(01:02:04) – Is big tech aligning with Trump?

(01:07:10) – 100x productivity

800 years before the Black Death, the very same bacteria ravaged Rome, killing 60%+ of the population in many areas.

Also, back-to-back volcanic eruptions caused a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome devastated by famine and disease.

I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else:

* Rome as a massive slave society

* Why humans are more disease-prone than other animals

* How agriculture made us physically smaller (Caesar at 5'5" was considered tall)

Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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SPONSORS

* WorkOS makes it easy to become enterprise-ready. They have APIs for all the most common enterprise requirements—things like authentication, permissions, and encryption—so you can quickly plug them in and get back to building your core product. If you want to make your product enterprise-ready, join companies like Cursor, Perplexity and OpenAI, and head to workos.com.

* Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities at scale.com/dwarkesh

To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.

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KYLE'S BOOKS

* The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

* Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

* Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425

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TIMESTAMPS

(00:00:00) - Plague's impact on Rome's collapse

(00:06:24) - Rome's little Ice Age

(00:11:51) - Why did progress stall in Rome's Golden Age?

(00:23:55) - Slavery in Rome

(00:36:22) - Was agriculture a mistake?

(00:47:42) - Disease's impact on cognitive function

(00:59:46) - Plague in India and Central Asia

(01:05:16) - The next pandemic

(01:16:48) - How Kyle uses LLMs

(01:18:51) - De-extinction of lost species