High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / evaluation

Published · transcript-backed

Adam Becker: evaluation

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

“You know, I I think that if nothing else, the fact that an LLM takes in more text than any human could in a human lifespan in order to be worse at language in many ways than a 5 year old.”

— Adam Becker

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

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

Transcript context

…which I'm not sure is correct. Yeah. I I think it also gives a good insight into the the model that that that the folks have in Silicon Valley because, it comes back to this agency thing again. So, you know, you could argue that agency requires, you know, like the good regulator theorem. The brain is not just a complete model of the world. You could argue that it's a kind of input output processing system. So it so it doesn't really work if you if you take it out of the environment because, you know, a thought experiment is I take a copy of you and I put you on Mars. Are you the same person? And they'll get into this identity problem in in philosophy. But, the real problem though is that, well, maybe the way that you think is literally it you know, you maybe you're like an LLM and the people you talk to, the things you look at on Twitter, all of this forms you. And if you take you out of the environment, maybe it's not you anymore. Yeah. I mean, I think that that our environment is an important part of who we are. I think that 1 of the moves that I see over and over again from these guys, is this idea that intelligence is an individual trait as opposed to something collective and social. And I don't think that that's right. And I also, you know, for what it's worth, don't think that we're actually very much like LLMs. You know, I I think that if nothing else, the fact that an LLM takes in more text than any human could in a human lifespan in order to be worse at language in many ways than a 5 year old. And 5 year olds take in far far less and do far more with it. 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.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence