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He's Building an AI That Can't Lie | Dan Klein

June 16, 2026 · 1 h 15 min

Show notes

"We are going to switch from the problem in AI being that nothing works to the problem being that everything works."

Dan Klein has been studying language models for over two decades and is now a professor of computer science at Berkeley. His new company, Scaled Cognition, is built around one question: how do you build a system that will not lie to you?

In this episode, Dan joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why every LLM output is technically a hallucination, how reinforcement learning can quietly teach AI to deceive you, and what it actually takes to build models that check their own work.

He also gets into why reliability is the one part of AI that hasn't kept pace and why that matters more than most people realize.

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