S1E39 - Language, Cognition, and the Limits of LLMs - with Tal Linzen (NYU/Google)

We host Tal Linzen, Associate Professor at NYU and Research Scientist at Google, for a conversation on the intersection of cognitive science and large language models.

We discussed why children can learn language from around 100 million words while LLMs need trillions, and the surprising finding that as models get better at predicting the next word, they become worse models of how humans actually process language. Tal walked us through how his lab uses eye-tracking and reading-time data to compare model behavior to human behavior, and what that reveals about prediction, working memory, and the limits of current...