Lex Fridman's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Here's my conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary Blizzard game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. Jeff is one of the most genuine & awesome human beings I've ever met: kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still & forever a gamer through and through. This was a truly fun & inspiring conversation. We talk about it all: the lows, the highs, the memes, the details of the game design process, and the new game he's been secretely working on: The Legend of California. I got a chance to play the game with Jeff, and it's incredibly beautiful (and fun). You can wishlist it on Steam now. I can't wait to play it with all of you! https://lnkd.in/gdsWS83V

Here's my conversation with David Kirtley, a nuclear fusion engineer, all about the physics and engineering of nuclear fission, fusion, and the future of energy. David is leading a team that's working to build the world's first commercial fusion power plant by 2028. This was a super technical conversation and a fascinating one, for both the near-term and the long-term future of human civilization. https://lnkd.in/gTEv2adf

It might be the caffeine speaking, but I love you all ❤️ Happy Valentine's day you sexy mf'ers. I'm writing this at a coffeeshop. Rain outside. A first date happening next to me, I'm hoping they make it. I'm feeling happy & grateful for all of this, human civilization, life on Earth, a spinning rock in space. There are 100-400 billion other planets in our galaxy alone. And there are ~2 trillion galaxies in just the observable universe. And somehow we have a chance to crack open the mysteries of the universe, to solve physics, biology, intelligence, to understand our own mind, to travel out toward the stars. And at the same time, we often bicker about the stupidest shit. The whole thing is hilarious and beautiful. All of this is a miracle ❤️ PS: It's definitely the caffeine speaking 🤣

I spent last week at Neurips (the big ML/AI conference) and had hundreds of amazing technical conversations with old friends and new. Beyond the technical, I'm deeply grateful for the love from all the folks who stopped me in the hallways and in the street to say kind words and share their research & life stories with me. Once again, I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. I took a lot of notes at the conference, and will try to write up my takeaways, on a new Substack: https://lnkd.in/gkufEQpT Additionally, I will likely do lecture(s) on the state-of-the-art in AI as I've done in the past. If this is interesting, please indicate your interest in this form: https://lnkd.in/gMhwHcAw I'm trying to get back to occasionally publishing in conferences & journals (because it's fun & makes me happy). As I said previously, grounding myself in engineering tasks many hours a day, humbles me to the reality of the world. For me, this is important to do regularly. I'm collaborating with a few incredible people at MIT and Caltech on human-robot interaction research, with humanoid and quadruped robots. It's a bit of an experiment to see if I can find the time to both do deep prep for each podcast episode (sometimes 100+ hours) and also do the serious research grind required to publish interesting papers. Like everything in life, when max effort is applied, even short-term "failure" leads to growth & lessons-learned, which is a win. So really, the only way to fail is to not try with max effort. What a crazy life this is… Truly, I'm a lucky dude. I love you all! ❤️

Feeling down about the world and about myself. Normal human things. I'm sure soon it'll be better. If you're down too, sending you love. I'm hiding from the world for a bit, enjoying the Boston fall months, long runs along the Charles river. I think humans are beautiful and fascinating and for the most part awesome. The internet seems to want to tell you otherwise. I disagree, but I don't have the right words for it. I'll probably do a long solo episode on Dostoevsky (especially Brothers Karamazov) at some point to help me articulate this better. I love you all.

80 years ago today, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki (Aug 9, 1945), the last time a nuclear weapon was used in war. Just a friendly reminder on this beautiful Saturday, that if one is ever used again, it will be the end of human civilization. There's a lot of division, turmoil, injustice, suffering in the world... but the truth remains that all of us humans are stuck here together on one small planet (for now), tasked with preserving the flame of human consciousness while wielding technology powerful enough to destroy everything we've ever built. The good news is that we humans are a clever bunch and are fundamentally compassionate at the core. So, I'm betting humanity lasts at least another thousand years, and I'm hoping for another million. But it is indeed very suspicious that we have not seen obvious signs of alien civilizations everywhere in the sky. Maybe the great filter is ahead of us and this whole intelligent civilization thing is harder to pull off than we realize. Either way, I'm glad I get to be alive here for a bit with all you.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde

Here's my conversation with Dave Plummer, programmer, former Microsoft software engineer (Windows 95, NT, XP), creator of Task Manager, author of two books on autism, and host of the much-loved Dave's Garage YouTube channel. https://lnkd.in/gNryrQNn

First, Happy New Year everyone! It's been a wild ride. I can't wait for 2026, LFG! I love you all! ❤️ Second, here's my conversation with Joel David Hamkins, mathematician and philosopher specializing in set theory, the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of infinity. We talk about paradoxes that challenged some of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Gödel Incompleteness theorems, the mathematical multiverse, the nature of truth, computation, and much more. By the way, Joel is the #1 highest-rated user on MathOverflow, and writes a great blog called "Infinitely More". https://lnkd.in/geCE47Xy

Erika Kirk gave a truly powerful speech 🙏 "Charlie wanted to save the lives of young men, just like the one who took his life... That man… that young man… I forgive him." "The answer to hate is not hate." Incredibly powerful, uniting words. Rest in Peace Charlie 🙏

Here's my conversation with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, about the future of AI & AGI, simulating biology & physics, video games, programming, video generation, world models, Gemini 3, scaling laws, compute, P vs NP, complexity, energy (solar & fusion), and much more. This was a fun & fascinating super-technical conversation. https://lnkd.in/grWciQhH

Happy birthday America. Greatest country on Earth! Thank you for giving a silly kid like me an opportunity. I'll try to not mess it up 👊🔥 I'm grateful for this life and for all of you ❤️ Also, I'm full of caffeine 🤣

Here's a 4-hour debate I hosted on the topic of Iran war, its nuclear program, and nuclear proliferation & geopolitics in general with Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz. This was intense and fascinating! https://lnkd.in/gFh9Bc87

I've spent this week in Dubai (first time) and made a lot of new friends, including this goat. Dubai is a beautiful place, unlike any I've ever been to, with super interesting people from all walks of life. What a wild ride this life is. I grateful for all of it ❤️

This has been an insane few days for AI: - GPT-5 & gpt-oss - Grok Imagine - Claude Opus 4.1 - Genie 3 - ElevenLabs Music The future is going to be wild 🤯

Doing a long, super-technical podcast on the state-of-the-art in AI. Let me know if you have question, topic suggestions. Everything from details of LLM training pipeline & architectures, to coding, robotics, scaling, compute, business, geopolitics, etc. Besides topics & questions... add papers, blogs, posts, rants, perspectives that you'd like to see covered.

Here's my conversation with Norman Ohler, a historian and author of "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich," a book that investigates the role of psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor give very high praise to for its depth of research. This was a fascinating conversation. https://lnkd.in/gBdcPrKB

I got to train with Khabib Nurmagomedov yesterday. This was an honor of a lifetime for me. He's a great fighter & leader and a great human being. From a grappling perspective, I don't think I've ever experienced this much top pressure in my life. I'll post the footage of the training in a few days. And also we'll do a long podcast (and dub it in multiple languages). In general, it was an incredible experience to train with the team and get to know many of the fighters from Dagestan. All are great people.

Programming with AI is insanely fun. Process is: 1. generate code 2. read & understand code that was generated 3. make small changes "manually" (still with great autocomplete) 4. test & debug 5. make big changes with new prompt 6. go back to step 1 Pure vibe coding skips step 2 & 3. And I think we'll need human expertise & experience for steps 2, 3 (and 4) for quite a while. But holy shit, I'm learning much faster, being way more productive, and having more fun. Not sure we're close to "AGI/ASI", but the software engineering world is definitely getting transformed very rapidly. It feels surreal to be experiencing it directly on a daily basis. Of course, there are both scary (jobs, security) & exciting (productivity, access) consequences to this transformation, as with all powerful technology. This post was fully written by human in one-shot without spellcheck, it's 100% organic human writing 🤣

The power of AI agents comes from: 1. intelligence of the underlying model 2. how much access you give it to all your data 3. how much freedom & power you give it to act on your behalf I think for 2 & 3, security is the biggest problem. And very soon, if not already, security will become the bottleneck for effectiveness and usefulness of AI agents as a whole (1-3), since intelligence is still rapidly scaling and is no-longer an obvious bottleneck for many use-cases. The more data & control you give to the AI agent: (A) the more it can help you AND (B) the more it can hurt you. A lot of tech-savvy folks are in yolo mode right now and optimizing for the former (A - usefulness) over the the latter (B - pain of cyber attacks, leaked data, etc). I think solving the AI agent security problem is the big blocker for broad adoption. And of course, this is a specific near-term instance of the broader AI safety problem. All that said, this is a super exciting time to be alive for developers. I constantly have agent loops running on programming & non-programming tasks. I'm actively using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and very carefully experimenting with OpenClaw. The only down-side is lack of sleep, and an anxious feeling that everyone feels of always being behind of latest state-of-the-art. But other than that, I'm walking around with a big smile on my face, loving life 🔥❤️ PS: By the way, if your intuition about any of the above is different, please lay out your thoughts on it. And if there are cool projects/approaches I should check out, let me know. I'm in full explore/experiment mode.

Here's my conversation with Irving Finkel, a scholar of ancient languages and Mesopotamian history. He specializes in deciphering cuneiform tablets from Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian contexts. He became widely known for studying a tablet with a Mesopotamian flood story that predates the biblical Noah narrative. We talk about ancient writing & language, controversial theories about ancient civilizations, Noah's Ark, flood myths, Göbekli Tepe, and much more. https://lnkd.in/gMK_khiW

It was an honor to hang out with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, and do a long-form podcast with him. Really fun & fascinating technical deep-dive conversation on & off the mic. One of the most brilliant & thoughtful human beings I've ever met. NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world by market cap and is the engine powering the AI revolution. Podcast probably out tomorrow (Monday), unless I get stuck in too many interesting conversations while running around in SF ;-) PS: I haven't checked my messages in days. Sorry for slow replies 🙏 Trying to stay deeply focused in an overwhelmingly intense time & barely hanging on. Love you all! ❤️

Over the past several weeks, I've been back in the lab working crazy hours like old times, and loving life. This was much needed. I'm happy ;-) If I'm not programming, hands-on with robots/hardware for many hours a day, I feel a bit lost and less able to think clearly about the world. It's just how my brain is built. I think it's because engineering humbles me to the reality of the world. I need both literature & engineering in my life 🤣 I love both, and both are a source of truth. I'm still doing the podcast, just adding much more engineering back into the mix ;-) The podcast gives me an opportunity to celebrate great scientists, engineers, and builders. This is one of the things I love doing most. In the coming months, I'll continue splitting time between MIT and Caltech (Boston & LA) working with some brilliant people. The focus of the work is human-robot interaction with quadrupeds and humanoid robots. I'll also likely be at NeurIPS in San Diego this year. If you want to chat over coffee in Boston, LA, or San Diego for NeurIPS or have guest suggestions in those places, please fill out the coffee or guest forms respectively (see links below). For NeurIPS, please choose the "NeurIPS 2025" option for special event in the form. Coffee form: https://lnkd.in/gVMUsCTM Guest suggestion form: https://lnkd.in/gArtPz2X Contact for other reasons: https://lnkd.in/gCvMseBF

Here's my 4+ hour conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram. This was one of the most fascinating and powerful conversations I've ever had in my life. We discuss everything from his philosophy on freedom to government bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, human nature, mathematics, encryption, great engineering & design, education, family, and his philosophy on life. This episode is available in English, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Hindi. To switch between languages on the main episode YouTube video, click: Settings (Gear Icon) ... Audio Track ... Choose Language. https://lnkd.in/gNGVP6q9

Claude Opus 4.6 & GPT Codex 5.3 out today, and OpenClaw recently. And I'm sure xAI/Grok & Google/Gemini will soon be out with more. What an exciting time to build stuff! I'm walking around with a smile, happy & sleep-deprived 🤣 Next week, I'll come to SF/Bay Area for a few days/weeks/months to hang out & build some stuff ;-) Looking to focus on programming, and contribute to good engineering teams. But occasionally socialize, in as much as my introvert brain allows. 2026 is going to be fun (and wild), LFG! PS: I'm doing a deep-dive podcast on OpenClaw with its creator soon. Let me know if you have questions. HIRING: Also, I really need help with podcast team/hiring 😰 For example, I'm currently editing, translating the Khabib podcast & training footage, and jungle video with Paul. I've been terribly slow on hiring, allocating no time to it. My resolution for 2026 is to actually make time to look through applications & interview people. So if you're a great editor, videographer, translator, or someone who can help make sure stuff runs on time as team manager/assistant please apply: https://lnkd.in/e8qticqM Some context: We have a tiny team, and I do all the prep, guest comms, production myself. I'm fine doing all that (it's more raw & human that way), but the post-production I can definitely use help with. Among other things, it's just more fun to work on creative projects with a team. Also, outside of hiring, if you just want to hang out, have guest suggestions, or questions, go to: https://lnkd.in/gCvMseBF

Here's my conversation with Keyu Jin all about China. She is an economist specializing in China's economy, international macroeconomics, global trade imbalances, and financial policy. She is the author of The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism. https://lnkd.in/giZnAXTv

Here's my conversation with Paul Rosolie, his 3rd time on the podcast, about his intense recent experience in the Amazon Jungle of a full-on encounter with the warriors of an uncontacted tribe. We show never-before-seen footage of this encounter. It's one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, and the whole story is fascinating. https://lnkd.in/gm6bX2UZ

Here's my conversation with Dave Hone all about T-Rex and the dinosaurs. Dave Hone is a paleontologist and all-around expert on dinosaurs. This was a truly fascinating and fun conversation: https://lnkd.in/etXcMES7

Merry Christmas! Love you all ❤️

Here's my conversation with Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent that has taken the Internet by storm, with now over 180,000 stars on GitHub. This was a truly mind-blowing, inspiring, and fun conversation! https://lnkd.in/dh6NsVrf

Here's my conversation with Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist and author, who in her work explores human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, the psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality. This was a fascinating conversation. https://lnkd.in/gCnHfHjB

Here's my conversation with Rick Beato, a musician, music educator, producer, songwriter, and host of a YouTube channel celebrates great musicians & musical ideas, and helps millions of people fall in love with great music all over again. https://lnkd.in/gjtbrvSS

View of Earth from 900 million miles away, with Saturn's rings in the image, taken by Cassini spacecraft. That dot is us, all 8 billion of us. It's all an insanely lucky miracle. I'm grateful for all of it & all of you. Love you all! ❤️ PS: Now, I'm off to partake in the great American Thanksgiving tradition of over-eating while getting into a heated philosophical argument with family 🤣

I'm traveling around Europe and Middle East soon (for some high-profile conversations). If you want to get in touch, contact me here: https://lnkd.in/gCvMseBF I'm looking to talk to interesting people from all walks of life. So places & guest recommendations are much appreciated.

Here's my conversation with Jack Weatherford, all about Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. He is the author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and many other books on the Mongol Empire. This was a truly fascinating conversation! https://lnkd.in/gHgrEPZD

Life is full of interesting surprises. I stopped by Paris and ran into these two (Pavel and Jack) separately, and we had an amazing conversation about life and freedom. The experience definitely felt like part of a simulation. I'm pretty sure the pic is AI generated. I'm grateful for this life, whatever it is, and for all of you 🙏❤️

I'm learning to STFU until I understand deeply. It's better to read, learn, think, before speaking. My brain's LLM has a latency of days, weeks, and sometimes years.

Here's my 6 hour conversation with DHH, a legendary programmer, creator of Ruby on Rails, author, and race car driver. This was a fun and inspiring conversation on everything from the future of programming & AI to the nature of happiness & productivity to the value of family, getting married and having kids. https://lnkd.in/gCpd8abb

Huge thanks to all the open source projects that've made a lot of the tech we rely on in the world possible: Linux Git FFmpeg PyTorch & TensorFlow Apache & Nginx MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite Chromium & Firefox GCC & LLVM Docker & Kubernetes Also, all the open-weight LLMs... and all the programming language interpreters, compilers, and frameworks. I can list 100+ more "niche" open source projects I've used & loved (e.g., OpenCV ❤️). But I just wanted to give a continued big thank you to the open source community for everything you do for humanity 🙏

Main quest for humanity: Avoid WW3

Programming is now 10x more fun with AI.

Here's a video of me training with Khabib Nurmagomedov, one of the greatest fighters of all time and a great human being. This was truly an honor for me 🙏 https://lnkd.in/gwhsx_q2

Here's my conversation with Michael Levin about the nature of intelligence in biological systems, including unconventional & alien intelligence, agency, memory, consciousness, and life in all its forms here on Earth and beyond. https://lnkd.in/gTh6qX5c

Here's my conversation with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the most valuable & one of the most influential companies in the history of human civilization. It is the engine powering the AI revolution. This was a fascinating & inspiring conversation, in parts super-technical on engineering of every part of the AI stack, memory, power, supply chain (TSMC, ASML, etc), in parts about leadership & psychology, and in parts personal & philosophical about life, consciousness, mortality, and human nature. https://lnkd.in/gd5nBFxs

Here's my conversation with Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and legendary creative mind behind Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Red Dead Redemption series of video games. I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan helped create. So, this was an incredible honor and pleasure for me. https://lnkd.in/gdJtinah

I stand with the people of Iran ❤️ I have a lot of Iranian friends, including my childhood best friend. Amazing people. It's one of the great cultures and peoples in the history of the world. Stay strong ❤️

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is truly disturbing. I'm in shock. There should be no place for political violence in this country. This is not what America is about. We are better than this. Rest in Peace Charlie 🙏

Here's my conversation all about AI in 2026, including technical breakthroughs, scaling laws, closed & open LLMs, programming & dev tooling (Claude Code, Cursor, etc), China vs US competition, training pipeline details (pre-, mid-, post-training), rapid evolution of LLMs, work culture, diffusion, robotics, tool use, compute (GPUs, TPUs, clusters), continual learning, long context, AGI timelines (including how stuff might go wrong), advice for beginners, education, a LOT of discussion about the future, and other topics. It's a great honor and pleasure for me to be able to do this kind of episode with two of my favorite people in the AI community: Sebastian Raschka and Nathan Lambert. They are both widely-respected machine learning researchers & engineers who also happen to be great communicators, educators, writers, and X posters. This was a whirlwind conversation: everything from the super-technical to the super-fun. https://lnkd.in/gViznQAt

Thank you for the birthday wishes 🙏 I'm grateful for another year around the sun, on this strange little planet of ours, with all of you. I've traveled a lot this year, and got to meet & talk to many people from all walks of life. The more conversations I had, the more optimism I gained for the future of humanity. We humans are a good bunch. I love you all ❤️

Long hike in LA hills with Andrew Huberman, one of my favorite humans (& best friends) on Earth. I enjoy hikes where you can be in nature and still, at some high-elevation points, see the city in the distance below. In those moments, it all seems so surreal. How did we clever humans build all of that? We went from hunter-gatherers to a civilization that can space travel and has a chance to colonize other planets and reach out toward the stars 🤯