“Predicting the next character in a dialogue requires behaving like the character in the dialogue would. And so, in that sense, part of their training, I think, can best be thought as training an actor, where it's like, you know, it's reading some play and it has to play all sides because it's predicting all the words.”
Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · October 2026
Ameisen is explaining why he thinks human-like language about language models is often the most accurate description. Models train on millions of dialogues, and a chat assistant is itself formatted as a dialogue, so the model is in effect playing the role of a helpful assistant.
Transcript
…right? And that in terms of understanding the kind of stuff that happens and predicting the kind of risks that materialize, de-anthropomorphization is actually a useful way to talk about LMs. And I have like a few reasons why I'll get into them, but I think that's probably my main take here.
Yeah, please share. Because I know Dorkesh famously, I don't know, fimblessly, put out this whole story of the Huggy Face incident and people criticized them for anthropomorphizing AI. So it's really interesting to hear you think that's actually a useful way to think about it. Talk more about that.
…these sort of like that these models are learning these general ideas, these general concepts. So that's one. So they have like, you know, an understanding kind of of the world. It's not just a surface level, like only the text. You have to understand the process that made the texts. Then there's a second reason, which is that. As part of this training, they also encounter millions of dialogues. Predicting the next character in a dialogue requires behaving like the character in the dialogue would. And so, in that sense, part of their training, I think, can best be thought as training an actor, where it's like, you know, it's reading some play and it has to play all sides because it's predicting all the words. And so, it has to sort of act as this specific character that was scorned in act one and like enacted revenge in act two and is facing the consequences in act three. And to do that well, you sort of like need to model what like the motivations and the feelings of that character might be. And then, another thing that people might not know is when you talk to Claude, when you talk to these…
Wow. Oh, my God. There's so much interesting stuff there. How often is your mind just kind of blown thinking about basically we've created this alien being that we are now under trying to understand what we have created? How often, as you watch, you're just like, wow, that's crazy. I didn't expect…
Yeah, a lot. This is just next token prediction on a bunch of text. You know, it's not, it hasn't been like, you know, it goes against so many of our intuitions. We're like, no, the way that you make an intelligence is, you know, you'd have like, you give it lessons, you bring it up, like, you do…
Wow. Something that comes up as you say that is what's interesting now is AI is helping us learn and evolve and progress, like AI tutoring and all these things. Just like it's interesting how it now is helping us accelerate our own understanding of the world. And I wonder if like this point you…
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