Winograd's 2025 Berkeley Talk

In April 2025, Terry Winograd delivered a talk at Berkeley's Institute of Design whose title deliberately echoed Hubert Dreyfus's 1972 book—the philosophical critique that had catalyzed Winograd's transformation from AI pioneer to phenomenological skeptic five decades earlier. The talk was remarkable for what it did not do: it did not declare victory (that language models vindicated the approach he'd critiqued) nor defeat (that his arguments had been refuted by machines' achievements). It held both observations—the distinction between processing and understanding is real; the practical implications of that distinction are narrower than predicted—and examined their tension with the care of someone who understood how easy it is to mistake appearance for reality. Winograd's position, distilled across fifty years: the capability is real and expanding, the absence of understanding is real and consequential, and the discipline is acknowledging both without collapsing into triumphalism or despair.