Episode · Dwarkesh Podcast · 2024-03-28
Dwarkesh Patel, Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken: books mentioned on Dwarkesh Podcast (Mar 2024)
Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken — How LLMs actually think
Had so much fun chatting with my good friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas on the podcast. No way to summarize it, except: This is the best context dump out there on how LLMs are trained, what capabilities they're likely to soon have, and what exactly is going on inside them.
Dwarkesh Patel discussed The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [12 stories] by Arthur Conan Doyle and The Symbolic Species by Terrence W. Deacon.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [12 stories]
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a classic collection of twelve short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the legendary detective.
Discussed“So you read Sherlock Holmes and the guy's incredibly sample efficient. He'll see a few observations and he'll basically figure out who committed the crime because there's a series of deductive steps”
Where to get it
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The Symbolic Species
Discussed“A book that Trenton recommended, The Symbolic Species, has this really interesting argument that language is not just a thing that exists, but it was also something that evolved along with our minds”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (2) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Passing 2001, a Space Odyssey
“I think 2001: A Space Odyssey was also one of the influential things. That's more related but it's clearly pulling in things from lots of different distributions.”
Passing The Lorax
“They're like, “we'll start you off with Lorax or something and then you'll learn.” I don't even remember what first-grade was like but you learned the things that first-graders learn”