Episode · Dwarkesh Podcast · 2025-05-22
Books mentioned on Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Anthropic.
Trenton Bricken discussed MOBY-DICK; or, THE WHALE by Herman Melville. Dwarkesh Patel discussed The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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MOBY-DICK; or, THE WHALE
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is an epic American novel that chronicles the obsessive, self-destructive quest of Captain Ahab to hunt down the giant white whale that maimed him.
Discussed“I think in an early Anthropic paper with needle in the haystack, like can the model retrieve—I think it was Moby Dick… There was some passage about, say, hot dogs. A lot of hot dog talk in Moby Dick?”
Where to get it
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The Secret of Our Success
The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich explores how human cultural evolution and cooperation, rather than raw individual intelligence alone, drove our species to dominate the globe.
Discussed“But we have so many innate biases to follow social norms. I mean Joe Heinrich's The Secret of our Success is all about this. Even if kids aren't in the conventional school system, I think it's sometimes noticeable that they aren't following social norms in the same ways.”
Where to get it
