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
They've convinced us that's really important.
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This is here to stay.
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The whole conversation recently has just been about what do we do
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with these long running prompt loops.
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And in that world where we feel like it's necessary to run those experiments and try to build those products, yeah, I don't want you to turn off anything that might give us a little bit of control over them.
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But there's another response here.
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Stop with the long-running prompt loops.
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Stop with these LLM-powered agents that go for thousands and thousands of prompts and execute whatever the LLM says every time.
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LLM outputs are unpredictable.
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They're non-normative, and they fall into narrative tropes like sci-fi tropes on which they were trained.
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And so if you let the output of an LLM control an actual actuated computer program—
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It's going to be like a game of telephone.
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Eventually, you prompt it enough times for enough steps, you're going to end up with a completely garbled plan of action, not at all what the human who originally set that in motion imagined that it would do.
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Because it just takes one weird response from the LLM, and now this whole path of actions goes off in some weird direction.
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And so I think what we need to do is stop with these long horizon prompt loops.
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We don't need them.
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You've proven to us, AI companies, that they're dangerous and unreliable.
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So let's stop building those and focus on exactly the type of products that these type of innovations, recurrent depth and loop transformers, would help, like building a natural language interface so I don't have to learn
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all of the stupid menus in PowerPoint to build a slideshow.
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I could just say what I want and it can translate that into a script that runs through an API and the thing looks better.
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Showing 341–360 of 22,298 · page 18 of 1115
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