Inside the Black Box: Cracking AI and Deep Learning
Learning the Past Tense in AI
19 August 2026 8:53 Arshavir Blackwell, PhD
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About this episode
This episode revisits the famous debate over whether language is learned through symbolic rules or distributed neural patterns, using the classic irregular verb U-shaped curve as the battleground. It then compares child language development with training snapshots from modern AI models, showing that transformers learn past tense in a strikingly different way: starting with the broad rule and gradually memorizing the exceptions.
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