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What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

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Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#61

Post by chongli »

falsaberN1 wrote: post #15
altruios wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what would be required for trusting an LLM? 1: 100% transparency. Open Source code, fully (and correctly) attributed training data. 2: A predictable model of what these models are actually encoding (so that hypothetical new models (or modifications) can be reasoned about).

Transparency won't help a lot from a technical standpoint (seems more like a solution to a legal issue than a technical one). I can't trust LLMs because they just...recombine text by probabilities and aren't deterministic. I get incorrect information every time I ask them a thing, and it's incorrect in different ways every time. The only things they seem to get consistently correct are very widespread facts that are…

I still find it funny we managed to get image generation working so much better than text.

If you care about veracity then image generation works about as well as text. Frequently you can find details of the image that are just bizarrely wrong, such as hands or food or other basic things. It's the same basic problem: there's no intelligence behind what it's doing, it just regurgitates mostly realistic-seeming pixels that are pretty good at fooling the casual viewer.

Really, it's like those moths with eyespots on them: good at fooling the brain's heuristics but obviously not real.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#62

Post by kergonath »

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.

> "reasoning by correlation" as superstition is a brutal insight.

I don’t think he is right on that one, though. Reasoning by correlation is a kind of empiricism, and it can be tested. “These things happen together” or “if I do this, then that happens” can be disproven with statistical analysis even without any understanding of the underlying mechanisms at play their causes.

Superstition is beyond that; it is a belief that cannot be proven and that is not based on logic. The problem with superstition is not that there is no causal link between the supposed cause and the effect, it’s that there is not even a correlation.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#63

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

fmap wrote: post #58
layer8 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>> Others have already mentioned this, but Alan Kay spent his entire career experimenting with approaches to radically simplify computing.

Yes. And yet, he created OOP [1]. Strange.

________________

[1] Not on his own.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#64

Post by smartmic »

samatman wrote: post #30
bongodongobob wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but it sounds like you're using ChatGPT3.5. I get very very few invented libraries unless it's a very specific version of an old or rare language. I tried your "ING" example and GPT4 got 100/100. Idk, ymmv, but GPT4 beats the pants off of 3.5.

I use GPT4 and it confabulates constantly. Try it on a language in the 10th-20th range of popularity (let alone lower) and I expect you'll see it as well. I don't see that as often with Python, the only top-5 language I currently work with.

I can confirm as well. I tried something with GNU APL ... and the answers were purely ridiculous. It fabulated some totally wrong stuff based on Dyalog APL with invented libraries and more.

Okay, I didn't expect usable results here but everyone should be aware... when even non-mainstream technologies are being discriminated, what about the human spectrum?

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#66

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dimal wrote: post #19

Off topic, but I didn't realize Alan Kay was regularly answering questions on Quora. I can ask "What does Alan Kay think about X?" and get an answer from Alan Kay?!?

Well, you can try. And if he doesn't answer you can always ask an LLM :|

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#67

Post by r00fus »

ianbicking wrote: post #59

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 intractab…

> 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

Except for the hallucination problem, sure. How do you ensure the answer you get from an LLM is not a hallucination? It sure doesn't.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#68

Post by Phiwise_ »

layer8 wrote: post #27
Xelynega wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erlang(and more modernly elixir/Gleam) are an example of this in practice, and were created to make it easier to ensure the working and manage the complexity of large systems.

Fair enough. But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.

>But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work.

Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this lecture where he says explicitly that Erlang should be the modern programmer's assembly?

https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY

In my experience, people who criticize Kay for being too vague or kvetching too pointlessly or lacking practical experience in computer science today almost always have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the vast majority of his work before deciding their opinion on it. It's hard to disagree with him that this makes us more like a pop culture than a profession after seeing it.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#69

Post by floren »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #21
falsaberN1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transparency won't help a lot from a technical standpoint (seems more like a solution to a legal issue than a technical one). I can't trust LLMs because they just...recombine text by probabilities and aren't deterministic. I get incorrect information every time I ask them a thing, and it's incorrect in different ways every time. The only things they seem to get consistently correct are very widespread facts that are…

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…

"You must have been using GPT 3.5..."

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#70

Post by pixl97 »

ianbicking wrote: post #59

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 intractab…

“All models are wrong, some are useful.”

What's kind of funny is almost all the people that complain about accuracy of LLMs would gladly answer the question of "What's the chance for rain today" without giving giving you a 5 minute lecture on what forecasts actually mean.

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