Ken Rogoff is the former chief economist of the IMF, a professor of Economics at Harvard, and author of the newly released Our Dollar, Your Problem and This Time is Different.

On this episode, we discuss China, inflation, and why more of the world is close to a debt crisis than people think.

Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Sponsors

* WorkOS gives your product all the features that enterprise customers need, without derailing your roadmap. Skip months of engineering effort and start selling to enterprises today at workos.com.

* Scale is building the infrastructure for smarter, safer AI. In addition to their Data Foundry, they recently released Scale Evaluation, a tool that diagnoses model limitations. Learn how Scale can help you push the frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh.

* Gemini Live API lets you have natural, real-time, interactions with Gemini. You can talk to it like you were talking to another person, stream video to show it your surroundings, and share screen to give it context. Try it now by clicking the “Stream” tab on ai.dev.

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

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – China is stagnating

(00:25:46) – How the US broke Japan's economy

(00:37:06) – America's inflation crisis is coming

(01:02:20) – Will AGI solve the US deficit?

(01:07:11) – Why interest rates will go up

(01:10:55) – US equities will underperform

(01:22:24) – When will dollar dominance end?

On this episode, I chat with Victor Shih about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI, what happens after Xi, and more.

Victor Shih is an expert on the Chinese political system, as well as their banking and fiscal policies, and he has amassed more biographical data on the Chinese elite than anyone else in the world. He teaches at UC San Diego, where he also directs the 21st Century China Center.

Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Sponsors

* Scale is building the infrastructure for smarter, safer AI. In addition to their Data Foundry, they just released Scale Evaluation, a tool that diagnoses model limitations. Learn how Scale can help you push the frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh.

* WorkOS is how top AI companies ship critical enterprise features without burning months of engineering time. If you need features like SSO, audit logs, or user provisioning, head to workos.com.

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

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – Is China more decentralized than the US?

(00:03:16) – How the Politburo Standing Committee makes decisions

(00:21:07) – Xi’s right hand man in charge of AGI

(00:35:37) – DeepSeek was trained to track CCP policy

(00:45:35) – Local government debt crisis

(00:50:00) – BYD, CATL, & financial repression

(00:58:12) – How corruption leads to overbuilding

(01:10:46) – Probability of Taiwan invasion

(01:18:56) – Succession after Xi

(01:25:10) – Future growth forecasts

New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Anthropic.

We talk through what’s changed in the last year of AI research; the new RL regime and how far it can scale; how to trace a model’s thoughts; and how countries, workers, and students should prepare for AGI.

See you next year for v3. Here’s last year’s episode, btw. Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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SPONSORS

* WorkOS ensures that AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic don't have to spend engineering time building enterprise features like access controls or SSO. It’s not that they don't need these features; it's just that WorkOS gives them battle-tested APIs that they can use for auth, provisioning, and more. Start building today at workos.com.

* 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.

* Lighthouse is THE fastest immigration solution for the technology industry. They specialize in expert visas like the O-1A and EB-1A, and they’ve already helped companies like Cursor, Notion, and Replit navigate U.S. immigration. Explore which visa is right for you at lighthousehq.com/ref/Dwarkesh.

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

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TIMESTAMPS

(00:00:00) – How far can RL scale?

(00:16:27) – Is continual learning a key bottleneck?

(00:31:59) – Model self-awareness

(00:50:32) – Taste and slop

(01:00:51) – How soon to fully autonomous agents?

(01:15:17) – Neuralese

(01:18:55) – Inference compute will bottleneck AGI

(01:23:01) – DeepSeek algorithmic improvements

(01:37:42) – Why are LLMs ‘baby AGI’ but not AlphaZero?

(01:45:38) – Mech interp

(01:56:15) – How countries should prepare for AGI

(02:10:26) – Automating white collar work

(02:15:35) – Advice for students