Connecting Language and (Artificial) Intelligence: Princeton’s Tom Griffiths

About this episode

Tom Griffiths discusses his book on the intersection of math, human, and machine intelligence.

In this bonus episode, Princeton University professor and artificial intelligence researcher Tom Griffiths joins Sam to unpack The Laws of Thought, his new book exploring how math has been used for centuries to understand how minds — human and machine — actually work. Tom walks through three main frameworks shaping intelligence today — rules and symbols, neural networks, and probability — and he explains why modern AI only makes sense when you see how those pieces fit together. The conversation connects cognitive science, large language models, and the limits of human versus machine intelligence. Along the way, Tom and Sam dig into language, learning, and what humans still do better — like judgment, curation, and metacognition. Read the episode transcript here. *Please take our listener survey: ⁠mitsmr.com/podcastsurvey⁠ It's short — we promise! — and all respondents will receive a free MIT SMR article collection, "Maximizing the Value of Generative AI." Me, Myself, and AI is a podcast produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and hosted by Sam Ransbotham. It is engineered by David Lishansky and produced by Allison Ryder. We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments…

People in this episode

Host: Sam Ransbotham

Guest: Tom Griffiths

Topics covered

• artificial intelligence
• cognitive science
• language models
• human intelligence
• machine intelligence
• probability

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• cognitive science
• language
• neural networks
• probability
• human intelligence
• machine intelligence

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Princeton University, MIT Sloan Management Review

Books & works: The Laws of Thought

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