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1 Feb 2026 Lex Fridman Podcast #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI
“I think the interesting, beautiful thing here is that you ask the LLM a math question, you know the correct answer, and you let the LLM figure it out, but how it does it is… I mean, you don’t really constrain it much.”
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- 1 Feb 2026
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- Lex Fridman Podcast
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…That’s the older term from it that was coined in Anthropic’s Constitutional AI paper. So a lot of these things come in cycles. Also, just one step back for the RLVR. I think the interesting, beautiful thing here is that you ask the LLM a math question, you know the correct answer, and you let the LLM figure it out, but how it does it is… I mean, you don’t really constrain it much. There are some constraints you can add, like ‘use the same language’ or ‘don’t switch between Spanish and English.’ But let’s say you’re pretty much hands-off. You only give the question and the answer, and then the LLM has the task to arrive at the right answer. But the beautiful thing here is what happens in practice: the LLM will do a step-by-step description, like how a student or a mathematician would derive the solution. It will use those steps and that helps the model to improve its own accuracy. And then, like you said, the inference scaling. Inference scaling loosely means spending more compute while using the LLM during inference, and here the inference scaling is that the model would use more tokens. In the DeepSeek R1 paper, they showed the longer they train the model, the longer the responses are. They grow over time. They use more tokens, so it becomes more expensive for simple tasks, but these explanations help the model with accuracy. There are also a lot of papers showing what the model explains does not necessarily have to be correct, or maybe it’s even unrelated to the answer, but for some reason, it still helps the model—the fact that it is explaining. And I think it’s also—again, I don’t want to anthropomorphize these LLMs—but it’s kind of like how we humans operate, right? If there’s a complex math problem in a math class, you usually have a note paper and you do it step by step. You cross things out. And the model also self-corrects, and that was, I think, the aha moment in the DeepSeek R1 paper. They called it the ‘aha moment’ because the model itself recognized it made a mistake and then said, “Ah, I did something wrong, let me try again.” I think that’s just so cool that this falls out of just giving it the correct answer and having it figure out how to do it—that it kind of does, in a sense, what a human would do. Although LLMs don’t think like humans, it’s a kind of interesting coincidence. And the nice side effect is it’s great for us humans to see these steps. It builds trust, and we can learn or double-check things. There’s a lot in here. I think- There’s been a lot of debate this year on if the language models—I think these aha moments are kind of fake because in pre-training, you essentially have seen the whole internet. So you have definitely seen people explaining their work, even verbally, like a transcript of a math lecture: “You try this, oh, I messed this up.” And what reinforcement learning—this RLVR—is very good at doing, is amplifying— —these behaviors, because they’re very useful in enabling the model to think longer and to check its work. I agree that it is very beautiful that this training kind of… the model learns to amplify this in a way that is just so useful at the final answers being better.…
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