#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Edward Gibson, or Ted, as everybody calls him. He is a Psycholinguistics Professor at MIT. He heads the MIT Language Lab that investigates why human languages look the way they do, the relationship between culture and language, and how people represent, process, and learn language. Also, he should have a book titled Syntax, A Cognitive Approach, published by MIT Press coming out this fall. So, look out for that. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Yahoo Finance for basically everything you've ever needed if you're an investor. Listening for, listening to research papers, Policygenius for insurance, Shopify for selling stuff online, and 8 Sleep for Naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfreedman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a new sponsor, and they got a new website that you should check out. It's a website that provides financial management, reports, information and news for investors. Yahoo itself has been around forever. Yahoo Finance has been around forever. I don't know how long, but it must be over 20 years. It survived so much. It evolved rapidly and quickly, adjusting, evolving, improving, all of that. The thing I use it for now is there's a portfolio that you can add your account to. Ever since I had zero money, I used, boy, I think it's called TD Ameritrade. I still use that same thing, just getting a basic mutual fund. And I think TD Ameritrade got bought by Charles Schwab or acquired or merged. I don't know. I don't know how these things work. All I know is that Yahoo Finance can integrate that and just show me everything I need to know about my quote unquote portfolio. I don't have anything interesting going on, but it is still good to kind of monitor it, to stay in touch. Now, a lot of people I know have a lot more interesting stuff going on investment-wise. So all of that could be easily integrated into Yahoo Finance, and you can look at all that stuff, the charts, blah, blah, blah. It looks beautiful and sexy and just helps you be informed. Now, that's about your own portfolio, but then also for the entirety of the finance information, for the entirety of the world. That's all there. The big news, the analysis of everything that's going on, everything like that. And I should also mention that I would like to do more and more financial episodes. I've done a couple of conversations with Ray Dalio. A lot of that is about finance, but some of that is about sort of geopolitics and the bigger context of finance. I just recently did a conversation with Bill Ackman, very much about finance. And I did a series of conversations on cryptocurrency. Lots and lots of brilliant people, Michael Saylor, so on. Charles Hoskinson, Vitalik, just lots of brilliant people in that space, thinking about the future of money, future of finance. Anyway, you can keep track of all of that with Yahoo Finance. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com. This episode is also brought to you by Listening, an app that allows you to listen to academic papers. It's a thing I have always wished existed. And I always kind of suspected it's very difficult to pull off, but these guys pulled it off. Basically, it's any kind of formatted text brought to life through audio. Now, for me, the thing I care about most, and I think that's at the foundation of listening, is academic papers. So I love to read academic papers, and there's several levels of rigor in the actual reading process. But listening to them, especially after I skimmed it, or after I did a deep dive, listening to them is just such a beautiful experience. It solidifies the understanding. It brings to life all kinds of thoughts. And I'm doing this while I'm cooking, while I'm running, while I'm going to grab a coffee, all that kind of stuff. It does require an elevated level of focus, especially the kind of papers I listen to, which are computer science papers. But you can load in all kinds of stuff. You can do philosophy papers. You could do psychology papers like this, very topic of linguistics. I've listened to a few papers on linguistics. I went back to Chomsky and listened to papers. It's great. Papers, books, PDFs, webpages, articles, all that kind of stuff. Even email newsletters. And the voices they got are pretty sexy. It's great. It's pleasant to listen to. I think that's what's ultimately most important, is it shouldn't feel like a chore to listen to it. Like I really enjoy it. Normally you'd get a two week free trial, but listeners of this podcast get one month free. So go to listening.com/lex. That's listening.com/lex.