Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy
About this episode
From the show’s notesIn this episode, Erik Torenberg is joined in the studio by Dwarkesh Patel and Noah Smith to explore one of the biggest questions in tech: what exactly is artificial general intelligence (AGI), and how close are we to achieving it?
They break down:
Read the show’s notes in full
Competing definitions of AGI — economic vs. cognitive vs. “godlike”
Why reasoning alone isn’t enough — and what capabilities models still lack
The debate over substitution vs. complementarity between AI and human labor
What an AI-saturated economy might look like — from growth projections to UBI, sovereign wealth funds, and galaxy-colonizing robots
How AGI could reshape global power, geopolitics, and the future of work
Along the way, they tackle failed predictions, surprising AI limitations, and the philosophical and economic consequences of building machines that think, and perhaps one day, act, like us.
Timecodes:
Resources:
Find Dwarkesh on X: x.com/dwarkesh_sp
Find Dwarkesh on YT: youtube.com/c/DwarkeshPatel
Subscribe to Dwarkesh’s Substack: dwarkesh.com
Find Noah on X: x.com/noahpinion
Subscribe to Noah’s Substack: noahpinion.blog
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