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Adam Becker: prediction

20 Aug 2026 Machine Learning Street Talk Every Exponential Ends — Silicon Valley Forgot — Adam Becker

“I would argue that we're learning some interesting things about how language works and what you can get out of the sort of mathematical structure and statistical properties of language.”

— Adam Becker

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Speaker
Adam Becker
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
prediction
Recorded
20 Aug 2026
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

Transcript context

…That right there is a good indication that, we're pretty different. I know. But but I I should push back a little bit because I don't know whether you played with Mythos before it got taken offline. But, you know, even though we can criticize the functionalism thing and we can talk about Chomsky's competence versus performance, you know, that there's a difference. But what what we do see, though, is that these models can do things that we do extremely well, they seem to be getting better all the time there. You know, even though they do a different type of syntactic processing than we do, arguably, it's in some ways better than than we do. So there's something is is is kind of validating their functionalist hypothesis. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something going on there. Right? And then the question is, okay, what is it? What's the significance of that? I would argue that we're learning some interesting things about how language works and what you can get out of the sort of mathematical structure and statistical properties of language. But, you know, I don't remember who said this, but people people speculate about whether, you know, LLMs are alive, but you don't speculate or alive, you know, conscious. But you don't hear people speculating about whether, systems with similar architectures that don't work with language are conscious. So nobody's asking if like AlphaFold is conscious. And I think that says a lot about how we as humans see systems that process and use language or or emit language as it were. Yeah. I mean, without spending too long on consciousness because we can get stuck Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We could get stuck there all day. That's right. You're kind of talking a little bit about what I would call AI psychosis. So there was that, you know, that there was that Google engineer famously with with the Lambda model, was it? A couple of a few years ago. And so so, yeah, we we anthropomorphize these models just like the ELISA system many, many years ago. Yes, indeed. Yeah. There are. Yeah. I mean, there there are folks that seriously are, you know, taking seriously the idea that these models might have some kind of phenomenal experience rather than just simulating. I mean and and the AI psychosis goes far broader than this, but this this is concerning to me. What do you think about that? I mean, the AI psychosis stuff is really, really terrifying…

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