logo
episode-header-image
Dec 2024
2h 43m

Adam Brown – How Future Civilizations Co...

Dwarkesh Patel
About this episode

Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift with is cracking maths and reasoning at Google DeepMind and a theoretical physicist at Stanford.

We discuss: destroying the light cone with vacuum decay, holographic principle, mining black holes, & what it would take to train LLMs that can make Einstein level conceptual breakthroughs.

Stupefying, entertaining, & terrifying.

Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube, read the transcript, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform.

Sponsors

- Deepmind, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, partner with Scale for high quality data to fuel post-training Publicly available data is running out - to keep developing smarter and smarter models, labs will need to rely on Scale’s data foundry, which combines subject matter experts with AI models to generate fresh data and break through the data wall. Learn more at scale.ai/dwarkesh.

- Jane Street is looking to hire their next generation of leaders. Their deep learning team is looking for ML researchers, FPGA programmers, and CUDA programmers. Summer internships are open for just a few more weeks. If you want to stand out, take a crack at their new Kaggle competition. To learn more, go janestreet.com/dwarkersh.

- This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Changing the laws of physics

(00:26:05) - Why is our universe the way it is

(00:37:30) - Making Einstein level AGI

(01:00:31) - Physics stagnation and particle colliders

(01:11:10) - Hitchhiking

(01:29:00) - Nagasaki

(01:36:19) - Adam’s career

(01:43:25) - Mining black holes

(01:59:42) - The holographic principle

(02:23:25) - Philosophy of infinities

(02:31:42) - Engineering constraints for future civilizations



Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
Up next
Jul 3
Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
I’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years. Here’s an audio version of where my thoughts stand as of June 2025. If you want to read the original post, you can check it out here. Get full ... Show More
14m 1s
Jun 2
Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
I’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years. Here’s where my thoughts stand as of June 2025. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe 
14m 1s
Jun 26
Godfather of Synthetic Bio on De-Aging, De-Extinction, & Weaponized Mirror Life — George Church
George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades.Professor Church thinks that these improvements (e.g., orders of magnitude decrease in sequencing & synthesis costs, precise ge ... Show More
1h 33m
Recommended Episodes
Dec 2024
How Diamond Cooling Could Power the Future of AI, with Akash Systems
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah sits down with Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell, founders of Akash Systems, a company pioneering diamond-based cooling technology for semiconductors used in space applications and large-scale AI data centers. Felix and Ty discuss how their backgro ... Show More
42m 21s
Apr 2024
Measuring The Speed of AI Through Benchmarks
David Kanter, Executive Director at MLCommons, discusses the work they’re doing with MLPerf Benchmarks, creating the world’s first industry standard approach to measuring AI speed and safety. He also shares ways they’re testing AI and LLMs for harm, to measure—and, over time, red ... Show More
31m 45s
Mar 2022
The promise of AI with Demis Hassabis
Hannah wraps up the series by meeting DeepMind co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis. In an extended interview, Demis describes why he believes AGI is possible, how we can get there, and the problems he hopes it will solve. Along the way, he highlights the important role of consciou ... Show More
30m 28s
Mar 2025
How AI is saving billions of years of human research time | Max Jaderberg
Can AI compress the years long research time of a PhD into seconds? Research scientist Max Jaderberg explores how “AI analogs” simulate real-world lab work with staggering speed and scale, unlocking new insights on protein folding and drug discovery. Drawing on his experience wor ... Show More
19m 15s
Sep 2024
Quantum computers aren't what you think — they're cooler | Hartmut Neven
Quantum computers obtain superpowers by tapping into parallel universes, says Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead of Google Quantum AI. He explains how this emerging tech can far surpass traditional computers by relying on quantum physics rather than binary logic, and shares a ro ... Show More
12m 18s
Jan 2025
#229 Mitesh Agrawal: Why Lambda Labs’ AI Cloud Is a Game-Changer for Developers
This episode is sponsored by Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more.   NetSuite is offering a one-of-a-kind flexible financing program. Head to  https://netsuite.com/EYEONAI to know more.  ... Show More
56m 7s
May 2023
TinyML: Bringing machine learning to the edge
When we think about machine learning today we often think in terms of immense scale — large language models that require huge amounts of computational power, for example. But one of the most interesting innovations in machine learning right now is actually happening on a really s ... Show More
45m 45s
Mar 2025
Apple's Siri-ous Problem + How Starlink Took Over the World + Is AI Making Us Dumb?
This week, as the long-promised new Siri faces increasing delays, we explore why Apple seems to be falling even further behind in artificial intelligence. Then, the New York Times reporter Adam Satariano joins us to explain how Elon Musk’s satellite internet provider Starlink too ... Show More
1h 2m
Sep 2024
The Frontier of Spatial Intelligence with Fei-Fei Li
Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson are pioneers in AI. While the world has only recently witnessed a surge in consumer AI, our guests have long been laying the groundwork for innovations that are transforming industries today.In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado joins F ... Show More
44m 40s
May 2021
2 - Quantum Computing Has A Purpose! (The Factoring Algorithm)
In the mid-90’s, there was no quantum computing field. There was excitement, sure, but nearly a decade and a half after the conference at MIT Endicott House, the possibilities of marrying physics and computer science had yet to yield a significant technological breakthrough. That ... Show More
38m 59s