{"podcast":{"title":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","slug":"astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483","podcast_index_feed_id":226483,"rss_url":"https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/website","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/1/2/d/4/12d4a6af46ce5199/SSC-Icon-large.png","author":"Jeremiah Prophet","episode_count":1170,"summary":"The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-10T22:20:14.870262+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483"},"episode":{"title":"New Paradigms Won't Save You","slug":"new-paradigms-won-t-save-you","published_at":"2026-06-19T11:29:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483/new-paradigms-won-t-save-you","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483","url":"https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/new-paradigms-wont-save-you","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/New_Paradigms_Wont_Save_You.mp3?dest-id=586545","summary":"One popular objection to AI concerns is to declare that LLMs can never be AGI. You need a \"new paradigm\". Therefore, AGI is so far in the future that it's not worth worrying about. A common counterargument is to claim that no, LLMs can become AGI. But even without that counterargument, I think the \"therefore\" fails on its own terms. The key question is: how much of a new paradigm do we need? The landmark discoveries on the road to modern LLMs are something like: 1950s: Neural networks 1967: Multi-layer perceptron 2010: Modern deep learning 2017: Transformer, LLM 2022: RLHF, chatbots 2024: Chain of thought / test-time compute We can think of this as an \"evolutionary tree\", where a given LLM (let's say Claude Opus 4.7) shares a recent \"common ancestor\" with all other chatbots, and only a very distant \"common ancestor\" with everything else descended from the multi-layer perceptron. If AGI needs a \"new paradigm\", what common ancestor can we expect AGI and LLMs to share? AGI will very likely use neural networks, because the human brain is a neural network and qualifies as an AGI. It will probably use deep learning, because although deep learning isn't exactly analogous to the brain, it seems like a pretty reasonable way to emulate the brain's learning algorithms onto computer hardware. Skeptics like Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus usually pinpoint LLMs/transformers as the step where we went wrong. LeCun thinks that the first AGIs may be within the deep learning paradigm (but not LLMs); Marcus thinks that they'll combine insights from deep learning with something else. How soon should we expect a new paradigm as revolutionary as LLMs/transformers? Since we got LLMs/transformers nine years ago, Lindy's Law suggests nine more years. How soon should we expect a new paradigm as revol…","meta_description":"One popular objection to AI concerns is to declare that LLMs can never be AGI. You need a \"new paradigm\". Therefore, AGI is so far in the future that it's…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":348,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483/episodes/new-paradigms-won-t-save-you/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast-226483/new-paradigms-won-t-save-you.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}