Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 155 posts

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#51

Post by adamrezich »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #42
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of the odd almost cultish community around LLMs seems to just be people who really want to be at the ground floor of the Next Big Thing who are so wildly biased into this being that next big thing that they will spend all their time, all their energy, not just on other people but on themselves, convincing themselves over and over that their LLM girlfriend really does love them, that their LLM assistant is goi…

I think it's under-appreciated how much LLMs harvest the natural, human tendency to generously ascribe meaning, subtext, and intent to text they read, glossing over flaws and small mistakes so long as the overall "thrust" seems reasonable enough. In a sense, LLMs have reinvented cold-reading from first-principles and created the cleverest Hans of them all.

We really should have figured out anthropomorphization and how to overcome it before we got to the "AI age".

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#52

Post by [deleted] »

skadamat wrote: post #2

This answer is amazing and classically Alan Kay! There's so much here to unpack because of all the different areas Alan draws from in his work (he's like a computing philosopher ). All I will say is that for people who want to understand his perspective, there's a large epistemological load to overcome. Sampling his talks is a good starting point though: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

[deleted]

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#53

Post by KorematsuFredt »

skadamat wrote: post #2

This answer is amazing and classically Alan Kay! There's so much here to unpack because of all the different areas Alan draws from in his work (he's like a computing philosopher ). All I will say is that for people who want to understand his perspective, there's a large epistemological load to overcome. Sampling his talks is a good starting point though: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

I wish someone could provide a tl;dr of that answer to us simpletons. His writing style is something I am unable to comprehend.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#55

Post by kurthr »

ozten wrote: post #29

> That humans also do this all the time is “interesting”, “dangerous” etc., but it is also why trying to move from superstition (this is actually what “reasoning by correlation” amounts to) to more scientific methods is critical for anything like civilization to be created. "reasoning by correlation" as superstition is a brutal insight.

It seems like the other part of this is the ability of LLMs to rationalize even answers that are not rational (he says piling BS on BS). That has previously been a very human (and quite distracting/confusing) activity and it's very effective on most people most of the time.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#56

Post by projektfu »

layer8 wrote: post #16
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did tho. He mentioned more than once that OOP was more about message passing than behavior + state.

Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? How do you ensure it will do what it is supposed to do? And Smalltalk wasn’t that, it is mostly just regular method calls and not “message passing”.

I disagree, not because methods do not get called, but because the Smalltalk sender is not calling a method, it is sending a message. It says to the runtime, here is an object and I want to send "#collect:" to it using this other object obj as a parameter. The runtime looks in the object's class for a method called "collect:" and, if found, calls the method with the receiver and obj. If not found, it will look in the superclasses until it cannot find it, then it will send "#doesNotUnderstand:" with the context, and go up the class hierarchy again. Because of the message-passing paradigm, the receiver can make behaviors that are unusual, such as proxying and delegation, in a more or less transparent fashion.

If the sender is calling a method, then that is a static arrangement and the result is not different from a function call.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#58

Post by fmap »

layer8 wrote: post #5
skadamat wrote: post #2

This answer is amazing and classically Alan Kay! There's so much here to unpack because of all the different areas Alan draws from in his work (he's like a computing philosopher ). All I will say is that for people who want to understand his perspective, there's a large epistemological load to overcome. Sampling his talks is a good starting point though: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

He always criticizes how everyone got computing wrong (fair enough), but never offers anything but the most vague suggestions of how to do things differently.

Others have already mentioned this, but Alan Kay spent his entire career experimenting with approaches to radically simplify computing. The progress reports from vpri give a good overview of a recent project that has since wrapped up, e.g.: https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2012001_steps.pdf

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#59

Post by ianbicking »

This feels like a limited and perhaps naive perspective on LLMs. If you looked at computers as adding machines in the 60s/70s then you'd be missing most of what was interesting about computers. And if you look at LLMs as a question answering service now, you are also missing a lot.

It's hard to compare trust of LLMs to other computing, because many of the things that LLMs get wrong and right were previously intractable. You could ask a search engine, but it's certainly no more trustworthy than an LLM, gameable in its own way. The closest might be a knowledge graph or database, which can formally represent some portion of what an LLM represents.

To be fair the relational systems can and will give "no answer" when an LLM (like a search engine) always gives some answer. Certainly an issue!

But this is all in the realm of coming up with answers in a closed system, hardly the only way LLMs can be used. LLMs can also come up with questions, for instance creating queries for a database. Are these trustworthy? Not entirely, but the closest alternative supportive tool is perhaps some query builder...? I have seen expert humans come up with untrustworthy queries as well... misinterpretation of data is easy and common.

That's just one example of how an LLM can be used. If you use an LLM for something that you can directly compare to a non-LLM system, such as speech recognition or intent parsing, it's clear that the LLM is more trustworthy. It can and does do real error correction! That is, you can get higher quality data out of an LLM than you put in. This is not unheard of in computing, but it is uncommon. Internet networking, which Kay refers to, might be an analog... creating reliable connections on top of unreliable connections.

What we don't have right now is systematic approaches to computing with LLMs.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#60

Post by Osmose »

layer8 wrote: post #5
skadamat wrote: post #2

This answer is amazing and classically Alan Kay! There's so much here to unpack because of all the different areas Alan draws from in his work (he's like a computing philosopher ). All I will say is that for people who want to understand his perspective, there's a large epistemological load to overcome. Sampling his talks is a good starting point though: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

He always criticizes how everyone got computing wrong (fair enough), but never offers anything but the most vague suggestions of how to do things differently.

He has generally great insights about principles to aim for, which is part of the answer, but no, he does not have the entire answer. His insights are inspiration for others who contribute their own parts to potential answers—that's how open collaboration works.
Post reply on HN