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Dwarkesh Patel: belief

26 Sept 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

“If you want to understand what it is that enables humans to go to the moon or to build semiconductors, I think the thing we want to understand is what makes that happen.”

— Dwarkesh Patel

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
26 Sept 2025
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…Why are you trying to distinguish humans? Humans are animals. What we have in common is more interesting. What distinguishes us, we should be paying less attention to. We’re trying to replicate intelligence. If you want to understand what it is that enables humans to go to the moon or to build semiconductors, I think the thing we want to understand is what makes that happen. No animal can go to the moon or make semiconductors. We want to understand what makes humans special. I like the way you consider that obvious, because I consider the opposite obvious. We have to understand how we are animals. If we understood a squirrel, I think we’d be almost all the way there to understanding human intelligence. The language part is just a small veneer on the surface. This is great. We’re finding out the very different ways that we’re thinking. We’re not arguing. We’re trying to share our different ways of thinking with each other.…

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