Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedEric Jang: belief
15 May 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
“Certainly, LLMs manage to do something that looks like real human reasoning without having to do an explicit tree structure. That being said, I think the idea of doing forward search and simulation to get a better sense of what is valuable might make a comeback, even if not in exactly the same instantiation as AlphaGo.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Eric Jang
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 15 May 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…Don’t LLMs natively learn to do MCTS, where they’ll try an approach and be like, “Oh, that doesn’t work. Let’s back up. Let’s try this other thing,” and then go in the direction that proves to be more fruitful? Certainly, LLMs manage to do something that looks like real human reasoning without having to do an explicit tree structure. That being said, I think the idea of doing forward search and simulation to get a better sense of what is valuable might make a comeback, even if not in exactly the same instantiation as AlphaGo. Just to make sure I understand the crux of it: the breadth comes from the number of legal actions being wider, and the depth comes from not being able to train a value function as easily, because……
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.