Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
32 published records
01 / belief
“I can give you a math formula for why each one of them is bad and where, and that’s kind of cool. I think that’s very neat.”
02 / uncertainty
“The space, the world space is a little different from my world space, so I don’t know what the things they talk about, things it’s going to have to do with their life as opposed to my industrial life, which is going to be different.”
03 / belief
“How do I frame the form of the meaning is all I’m talking about. You’re talking about a harder thing, I think.”
04 / belief
“I believe as you hinted, that language is an invented system by humans for communicating their ideas.”
05 / belief
“In every language, I think everyone agrees that all sentences are trees at some level.”
06 / belief
“I want languages to survive because they’re so interesting for so many reasons. But I mean, I find them fascinating just for the language part, but I think there’s a lot of connections to culture as well, which is also very important.”
07 / belief
“In understanding the structure of that communication, I think you start to understand the structure of thought and the structure of meaning behind those thoughts and communication, to me.”
08 / belief
“I’d say the dependency structures aren’t that hard generally, I think there’s a lot of agreement of what they are for almost any sentence in most languages.”
09 / uncertainty
“The ability to count enables you to come up with interesting things probably. So yes, you develop counting because you need it, but then once you have counting, you can probably come up with a bunch of different inventions, how to, I don’t know what kind of thing they do matching really well for building purposes, building some kind of hut or something like this.”
10 / belief
“I think naive is an indication that’s incorrect somehow. It’s trivial, too simple.”
11 / uncertainty
“I just say words. Your words are morphemes between, we don’t know that. Actually that’s a very good question.”
12 / belief
“I agree with you that it would be nice to figure out… So, there’s some way to figure out the cost.”
13 / uncertainty
“Correctly, meaning they’ll do a three-verb phrase. I don’t know what’s correct or not.”
14 / uncertainty
“People will do the same thing. And so it’s like, “I don’t know what it means exactly, but it’s doing something.”
15 / belief
“Technically, I think phrase structure grammar is mappable to dependency grammar.”
16 / belief
“We probably don’t want to treat them all as the same. And so I think that the right model, a better model of a noisy channel would have three different sources of noise, which are background noise, speaker-inherent noise and listener-inherent noise.”
17 / uncertainty
“Oh, another fascinating little tidbit is that even if they’re these constructed languages like Klingon or I don’t know the languages from Game of Thrones, I’m sorry, I don’t remember those languages.”
18 / belief
“We think that that’s the kind of a style which tells you it’s legalese, it’s a reasonable guess.”
19 / belief
“As a kid in school, when we had to structure sentences and English grammar, I found that process interesting.”
20 / belief
“There’s a bilateral network, which I think she tends to call the multiple demands network, which does anything kind of hard.”
21 / belief
“There’s this sort of weird view, well, odd view, I think that to think that human language is somehow special.”
22 / observation
“We can figure those out very well. The problem is the when. It’s measuring oxygen.”
23 / evaluation
“I think the incentives under which you operate are not always transparent to the members within that system.”
24 / evaluation
“We can’t see how languages change or anything because we’ve got these snapshots of a few hundred or a few thousand languages.”
25 / prediction
“Should I trade for door number two, even though I know the good prize in door number one? And then the large language model say, “Yes, you should trade,” because it just goes through the forms that it’s seen before so many times on these cases where yes, you should trade because your odds have shifted from one in three now to two out of three to being that thing.”
26 / preference
“I think I’m still tying meaning and form together in my head, but you’re saying if you keep the meaning of what you’re saying constant, the optimization, it could be The primary objective of that optimization is for production.”
27 / evaluation
“On Reddit, there’s different communities and they’ll come up with different slang, usually from my perspective, driven by a little bit of humor or maybe mockery or whatever, just talking shit in different kinds of ways. And you could see the evolution of language there because I think a lot of things on the internet, you don’t want to be the boring mainstream.”
28 / prediction
“No, I think the primary objective is about the listener because otherwise, if you’re optimizing for the ease of production, then you’re not going to have any of the interesting complexity of language.”
29 / uncertainty
“I mean, we don’t know. This is one of those problems with the snapshot of just current languages is that we don’t know what causes a culture to discover/ invent accounting system.”
30 / preference
“I like dependency grammar because it’s more perspicuous, it’s more transparent about representing the connections between the words.”
31 / evaluation
“Now, you’re saying is it a good theory? Well, probably not because I want a smaller theory than that.”
32 / prediction
“That’s one center embedding of a clause, and turns out they’re massively center embedded. So, I think in random contracts and in random laws, I think you get about 70%, something like 70% of sentences have a center embedded clause, which is insanely high.”