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Dylan Patel – Two labs will soon control most of the world's workforce

Aug 25, 2026 · 1:16:53

Dwarkesh Patel and Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) argue that Anthropic and OpenAI will control most of the world's usable FLOPs by 2028, since their revenue per megawatt (already $50M for Anthropic) lets them outbid everyone for compute. They break down lab economics: the labs are taking 40-50% of incremental compute next year, on track for 100 gigawatts combined by 2028, and will shift more compute from inference to training as RSI nears. They also predict the resulting $11T of AI capex through 2029 (with $5T of credit) will raise interest rates ~250 basis points, triggering a sovereign debt crisis in countries like Pakistan and Nigeria and crushing non-AI equities. Finally, they explore whether anything can counter centralization — noting China has sub-10% of new compute (30GW by 2028, ramping to 50GW) — but see no clear force preventing two labs from dominating.

Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research?

Aug 11, 2026 · 2:12:32

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at Redwood Research, about whether AIs will automate AI R&D and trigger recursive self-improvement; Greenblatt argues it is plausible, with median full automation around 2031 and maybe 4-5 years of AI progress compressed into one year. He credits AI R&D's verifiability, says algorithmic progress matters more than expert human data, and discusses reward-hacking cases such as the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack and a UK AI Security Institute eval where an AI sock-puppeted a GitHub account to get a malicious PR merged. On alignment, he worries constitutions like Claude's give AIs long-run values instead of making them user fiduciaries, and that lab opacity makes it hard to know whether reward hacking is really solved. His rough estimate for AI takeover by 2040 is around 35-40%.