Dr. Jeff Beck

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455 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 25 Jan

Dr. Jeff Beck’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) · VAEs Are Energy-Based Models? [Dr. Jeff Beck] · 25 Jan 2026 podcast

even remotely agentic unless it's executing and doing planning counterfactual reasons so like your chess program is is like oh clearly it's doing some planning and counterfactual reasoning because you know it's doing it but um but it but you couldn't like right i could describe the exact same set of behaviors just with the policy function

Yeah.

So in my mind, that is the fundamental feature of an agent.

If you can show that it's engaged in planning counterfactual reasoning, then it's definitely an agent.

My argument is just simply that that's hard to do unless you crack it open and see what's going on inside.

Now you could take a pragmatic view and say, well, if the simplest computational model of the behavior, model it as if it was doing planning and counterfactual reasoning, then you can draw an implicit conclusion that, oh yes, well, I may as well say it's an agent.

And that's kind of the approach that I've taken.

So like one of the things that comes out of the physics discovery algorithm is that you apply it to agents and what do you get?

Well, you get a model.

Now bear in mind, I called them all objects before and I didn't change anything.

to make it special to an actual agent, right?

But what I do have the ability to do because of the model is I can look at the internal states associated with that object that I want to call an agent and look at how sophisticated it is, right?

And that degree of sophistication is what allows me to say, oh, well, I'm going to go ahead and say that like, and I like the whole idea.

It's a great idea.

Like, let's have a metric, right?

Right.

And I'm sure it would be something that would effectively be like transfer entropy or something like that.

But we have this metric on like, well, how sophisticated were the internal states that were necessary in order to generate this output?

And if it's above some threshold, we'll call it an agent.

I don't like thresholds, but, you know, we just sort of say a degree of agency, a degree of sophistication.

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