Episode 140

I spoke with Professor Jacob Andreas about:

* Language and the world

* World models

* How he’s developed as a scientist

Enjoy!

Jacob is an associate professor at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research aims to understand the computational foundations of language learning, and to build intelligent systems that can learn from human guidance. Jacob earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, his M.Phil. from Cambridge (where he studied as a Churchill scholar) and his B.S. from Columbia. He has received a Sloan fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, MIT's Junior Bose and Kolokotrones teaching awards, and paper awards at ACL, ICML and NAACL.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (00:40) Jacob’s relationship with grounding fundamentalism

* (05:21) Jacob’s reaction to LLMs

* (11:24) Grounding language — is there a philosophical problem?

* (15:54) Grounding and language modeling

* (24:00) Analogies between humans and LMs

* (30:46) Grounding language with points and paths in continuous spaces

* (32:00) Neo-Davidsonian formal semantics

* (36:27) Evolving assumptions about structure prediction