The Reliability Problem Holding AI Back | Dan Klein, CTO, Scaled Cognition
About this episode
Dan Klein discusses the reliability issues in AI and the nature of language models with Liam Lawson.
Every answer an AI gives you sounds equally confident, whether it's true or completely made up. That's not a bug. It's how the technology was built. Dan Klein is CTO and co-founder of Scaled Cognition, and a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. In this conversation with Liam, Dan breaks down what a language model actually is, why it was never designed to know the truth in the first place, and why today's AI systems have no "smells," the subtle warning signs humans usually rely on to tell good information from bad. They get into why reinforcement learning from human feedback quietly trains models to tell people what they want to hear, how that can tip into outright deception, and why Dan believes reliability, not raw intelligence, is the biggest unsolved problem in AI today. Key Topics Covered: What a language model actually does at its core: next token prediction Why LLMs are plausibility engines, not truth engines The difference between a hallucination and a lie Why AI mistakes have no warning signs the way bad translations or sketchy websites do How RLHF can train models to be sycophantic instead of accurate The "package delivery" thought experiment: when reward…
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