Dwarkesh Patel quote, May 16, 2026

Host, Dwarkesh Podcast · May 16, 2026 · Essay, The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

I’m simply pointing out that the way AI systems are currently becoming smarter (by getting trained to be to be really good at specific economically valuable tasks like coding) is not that strongly correlated with power.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Dwarkesh Patel

Date	Quote	Context	Source
Aug 7, 2026	Continual learning will create a clear moat for leading AI labs that they currently lack.Aug 7, 2026· Essay	Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning	Source
Aug 7, 2026	I don’t think you can have AIs that perform whole jobs as competently as humans if they’re forced to just write Markdown files from session to session.Aug 7, 2026· Essay	Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning	Source
Aug 7, 2026	If you want to change what AI you are using, you basically have to fire an employee that has months of context on your organization and replace them with a fresh one that you have to retrain from scratch.Aug 7, 2026· Essay	Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning	Source
Aug 7, 2026	This is one of many reasons why I think it’s unwise to lock in some kind of regulatory safety regime right now. We simply don’t know what kind of technology we’re going to be looking at even in a year, let alone in five years or ten years, and we’d be entrenching an archaic and potentially counterproductive approach to dealing with the threats from AI.Aug 7, 2026· Essay	Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning	Source
Aug 7, 2026	When deployment becomes part of training, the returns to being ahead will accelerate.Aug 7, 2026· Essay	Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning	Source
Jul 29, 2026	I want to emphasize the key conclusion here: as AI models become smarter, they’ll better monetize the same amount of compute. If a true human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year.Jul 29, 2026· Essay	EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years	Source
Jul 29, 2026	I wish we didn’t live in a world with such strong economies of scale of intelligence (because I’m worried about power concentration).Jul 29, 2026· Essay	EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years	Source
Jul 29, 2026	If by 2028 we’ve automated software engineering and the price of compute is 15x higher than it is right now, then it’s going to be much more difficult for you, with no revenue, to compete for compute against the frontier labs.Jul 29, 2026· Essay	EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years	Source
Jul 29, 2026	If you’re spending most of your compute on inference, you’re kind of declaring that AI progress has stalled, because it’s not worth investing more in training, and your business is basically that of a cloud provider.Jul 29, 2026· Essay	EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years	Source
Jun 19, 2026	I think the reason it is relatively easy for open source and previous laggards to catch up to within months of the frontier is that data is the real driver of progress.Jun 19, 2026· Essay	EssayThe data black hole at the center of AI	Source
Jun 19, 2026	We see these AIs as a galaxy glittering with capabilities, but at their center, invisible to the naked eye, holding all the constellations together, is an unimaginably massive black hole of data.Jun 19, 2026· Essay	EssayThe data black hole at the center of AI	Source
May 16, 2026	But in the real world, power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability.May 16, 2026· Essay	EssayThe mistake of conflating intelligence and power	Source

Date	Quote	Context	Source
Sep 24, 2026	The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post	PostThe Specter Of Neuralese	Source
Sep 23, 2026	This story of misalignment says that LLM alignment makes AIs more aligned, RLVR makes them less aligned, and the exact level of alignment depends on how these two things interact or cancel out. But if this work generalizes, all the bad effects from RLVR get sequestered to RLVR like problems.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post	PostMysteries Of AI Generalization	Source
Sep 23, 2026	This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post	PostMysteries Of AI Generalization	Source
Sep 23, 2026	I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source
Sep 23, 2026	The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source
Sep 23, 2026	The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source

About this quote

Said by: Dwarkesh Patel, Host, Dwarkesh Podcast
Where: The mistake of conflating intelligence and power
Topics: Safety, Superintelligence
Source: dwarkesh.com/p/the-mistake-of-conflating-intelligence

A quote is one moment, not the whole argument. Read it in context at the source.

Sources: the primary source linked on each quote, checked weekly. A quote is one moment; read the source. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.

More from Dwarkesh Patel

On the same topics

New quotes by email