Andrej and Dwarkesh as philosophy

If you follow AI at all, you probably do not need another recommendation of the Andrej Karpathy and Dwarkesh Patel podcast, linked to here:

I hardly ever listen to podcasts, but at almost two and a half hours I found this one worthwhile and that was at 1x (I don’t listen to podcasts at higher speed, not wanting to disrupt the drama of the personalities).  What struck me is how philosophical so many aspects of the discussion were.  Will this end up being the best “piece of philosophy” done this year?  Probably.  Neither participant of course is a trained philosopher, but neither were Plato or Kierkagaard.  They are both very focused on real issues however, and new issues at that.  And dialogue is hardly a disqualifying medium when it comes to philosphy.

Some guy on Twitter felt I was slighting this book in my tweet on the matter.  I’ll let history judge this one, as we’ll see which issues people are still talking about fifty years from now (note I said nothing against that book in my tweet, nor against contemporary philosophy, I just said this podcast was philosophical and very good).  I’ve made the point before (pre-LLM) that current academic philosophers are losing rather dramatically in the fight for intellectual influence, and perhaps more of a serious engagement with these issues would help.  I’ve seen plenty of philosophical work on AI, but none of it yet seems to be interesting.  For that you have to go to the practitioners and the Bay Area obsessives.