Daniel Kokotajlo
speaker
687 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 19 Jun
Daniel Kokotajlo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So why aren't LLMs able to leverage this enormous asymmetric advantage they have to make a single new discovery like this?
I will actually disagree with this.
We know that humans can do... We have examples of humans doing this.
I agree that we don't have logical omniscience because there is a combinatorial explosion.
But we are able to leverage our intelligence to... Actually, one of my favorite examples of this is David Anthony, the guy who wrote The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.
He made this...
It was a super impressive discovery before we had the genetic evidence for it, like a decade before, where he said, look, if I look at all these languages in India and Europe, they all share the same etymology.
I mean, literally what you're talking about, the same etymology for words like wheel and cart and horse.
And these are technologies that have only been around for the last 6,000 years, which must mean that there was some group that—
these groups are all at least linguistically descended from.
And now we have genetic evidence for the Yamnaya, which we believe is this group.
You have a blog where you do this.
This is your job, Scott.
So why shouldn't we hold the fact that language models can't do this more against them?
I mean, it seems like such an economically valuable... But how would you set up the training environment?
Well, maybe that's why you should have longer timelines.
It's a gnarly engineering problem.
And then let me just address that in a second, but just one final thought on this thread.
To the extent that there's like a modus ponens, modus tollens thing here, where one thing you could say is like, look, AIs, not just LLMs, but AIs will have this fundamental asymmetric advantage where they know all this shit.
And why aren't they able to use their general intelligence to use this asymmetric advantage to some enormous capability overhang?
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