Cal Newport
speaker
22,298 appearances
39 recordings
5 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Cal Newport’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 39 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 9.
Appearances
So the concern within the thing that all those security researchers were pushing back on is, hey, OpenAI, like a month and a half after you let your unsupervised prompt loops wreak havoc,
podcast-host
all over the internet, and then put out a really long report that used chain of thought, traces of the chain of thought reasoning to help explain what happened, this feels like a bad time to say we're going to start turning down the amount of chain of thought reasoning that our agents do.
podcast-host
Gary Marcus put this, I think, in the right way.
podcast-host
I'm going to read his quote here.
podcast-host
He said, "...the turn-off chain of thought now..."
podcast-host
Before we have like better ways of doing this is like kicking out a rickety scaffolding before we have built something better.
podcast-host
All right.
podcast-host
So people who are concerned about LLM powered agents are saying, look, you can't don't introduce tools right now.
podcast-host
They're going to turn down the chain of thought, even if your intentions are different as you're trying to build cheaper models for the rest of us.
podcast-host
Now is not the time to do it until you can assure us that your swarm of AI monsters can be controlled some other way.
podcast-host
So that's the crux.
podcast-host
That's what's bad about this.
podcast-host
So we know what's good about it.
podcast-host
We know what's bad about it.
podcast-host
These things are in conflict.
podcast-host
All right, final part.
podcast-host
What is the hype here?
podcast-host
Well, to me, the hype is the AI companies convincing us and the world that we need LLM-powered agents.
podcast-host
That for some reason...
podcast-host
The real use case that's critical for them to test, and there's nothing they can do about it, is taking prompt loops that repeatedly prompt an LLM and say, what should I do next, and then blindly execute what the LLM output says, and then repeats that for days.
podcast-host
Showing 321–340 of 22,298 · page 17 of 1115
← Previous
Next →