Get Paul Masset on Dwarkesh Podcast

Paul Masset is breaking new ground on how the brain actually learns over different time horizons, with a June 2025 Nature paper showing dopamine neurons implement multi‑timescale reinforcement learning, a finding that could directly inspire better AI agents today. He was also named a 2025 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a signal that his cross‑disciplinary work at McGill and Mila is shaping the frontier right now.

As labs in 2026 pivot from brute‑force scaling to agents that learn efficiently from experience, Masset’s research on biologically plausible, distributed RL and neuron‑specific discounting gives builders concrete design principles they can use immediately. Dwarkesh’s show is where cutting‑edge AI ideas get stress‑tested in public, so this conversation could influence how practitioners think about reward design, safety, and data flywheels in the months ahead.

He has not appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast before, so this would be a timely first. Back this and support this nomination today.