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

91–100 of 155 posts

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#91

Post by alexvoda »

Phiwise_ wrote: post #68
layer8 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You hit the nail head on. The field of IT is a pop culture and consequently just as prone to fads and periodic fashions.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#92

Post by aaroninsf »

Always a welcome and thoughtful opinion, but not correct about the potential for LLM. Waving away their output as "BS" is awfully flip, and IMO is hence one more example of Ximm's Law (that every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.)

One might find ambiguity in his criticism though, that LLM alone are insufficient... but, that's what Ximm's Law is saying. It's not very interesting to (as I would say, he does here) take on straw, rather than steel.

(A steely defense of LLM is to say that no one is particularly interested in scaling LLM without other improvements, though scaling alone provides improvements; multi-modal, multi-language, long-context, and most of all augmented systems which integrate LLM into systems rather than making them "systems on a chop", are where things look and IMO will be interesting.)

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#93

Post by codethatwerks »

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.

Causation is just correlation, and a good story. :-)

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#94

Post by svieira »

> By “help” I mean that — especially when changes in epistemological points of view from one’s own common sense are required , it can make a huge difference to be near a “special human” whose personality is strong enough to make us rethink what we think we know.

This is how I measure Ed-Tech companies. Do they have an awareness that you cannot replace the connection with other human beings that is an essential part of teaching with "facts" or not? If "yes, they have that awareness" how do they mitigate the problem?

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#95

Post by Phiwise_ »

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”.

Does a full free operating system, all the way down to the metal, and hypermedia publishing suite in 936kB count as "a system of any complexity" that "will do what it is supposed to do" to you? If not, what specifically is your standard? https://youtu.be/BUud1gcbS9k

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#96

Post by atoav »

kergonath wrote: post #62
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 belie…

The problem here is that correlation is not a hard term for the people doing drawing the lines. People who take homeopathics for example will assure you they always get healthy when they took the sugar pills. What they fail to see is that they would have gotten healthy without it as well.

If you always rub your lucky penny before playing a sports game a superstitious person would account wins for the penny and excuse losses by not having rubbed the penny enough, the right way, not concentrated enough. This also feeds into correlation.

We are not talking about things actually being correlated, we are talking about people believing they are. Those are two wildly different things one is physical reality and doesn't change when you ignore it, the other is bound to individuals and tbeir world view and can take on absolutely ridiculous forms.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#97

Post by cxr »

the_af wrote: post #71
layer8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

> Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? Reminds me of the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding (though I respect and like Alan Kay way more). If you've read any of his online interactions, apparently nobody does REST like he envisioned. It simply doesn't exist in the wild. When asked about some REST API, he'll claim it's not RESTful, it's wrong…

> the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding

I think you're confused about who Fielding is and what REST is about. His writing isn't about building "true" RESTful APIs. It isn't really about APIs per se at all, RESTful or not. (Further, Fielding to my knowledge isn't even known for his use of the word "RESTful".) It sounds like you've probably been misled by a bunch of people who aren't Fielding about what's in his dissertation. Not unreasonable in those circumstances that one be told to actually read the thing instead of guessing at the gestalt of it based on ambient chatter which is by and large very misinformed.

Having said that, Fielding's writing is not something I would exalt for its clarity. I'm partial to jcrites's explanatory powers: "REST describes how the Web works" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561>

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#98

Post by ein0p »

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’s great that he recognizes that most people aren’t to be trusted either. Most people outside the field are talking about “safety” as though humans never lie or make up bullshit, whereas in reality I trust GPT4 much more than I’d trust an average human, just not 100%. Literally people keep hyperventilating about “fake news” generation even though their entire news consumption already consists solely of pre approved narratives, many of which are fake, by omission or otherwise.

I can’t wait for the day when ultra long context LLMs are able to point out omissions and factual contradictions in human produced fake news for any given event

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#99

Post by ToucanLoucan »

Me1000 wrote: post #84
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…

You seem to be making a point in good faith so I would like to give you a slightly different perspective. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "cultish community", from my perspective there are a few distinct communities around LLMs, all focusing on different aspects, all excited about different things. One common theme across all the groups though is that they used an LLM for the first time and their mind ran wild…

I mean I think the biggest problem with the LLM community is that a sizable portion of not a majority of it consists of the exact same opportunistic "ground floor" people as just jumped off of cryptocurrency as the "thing they refuse to shut up about" which is all well and good when it's an exciting new thing that might change the world, but gets notably more insufferable when it's obviously just the newest route that person sees to getting greater amounts of money and/or social media clout, and they clearly do not know anything about it beyond it's potential to do those things. The colloquial term for that, I think, being "grifter." And to be clear, LLMs are not unique in their ability to draw in those types of insufferable people: see the aforementioned comment about crypto, it was the last big one, and before that probably dropshipping. But I digress.

And I bring all that up to say: no, the vast majority of people, I don't think expect the computer to come to life and tell them it loves them. I think the vast majority, in fact, don't know a fucking thing about LLMs beyond maybe the rote copy/pasted code it takes to bring one into existence, or if we're being honest, more likely, the websites to put their credit card information into to gain access to one for their use, and that shift in base assumptions I think explains why they speak so incoherently: they do not understand it in any depth, and thereofre, they might think the computer will come to life, because they don't know much about computers in general and to a layman, what an LLM does can indeed look like a vague imitation of life.

Like, I mean this in the nicest way possible though just by virtue of what I'm going to say, it is going to sound mean, but: tons of the really big pro-AI hype people just, clearly, bluntly, full disclosure, do not know shit about LLM. Quite a large slice of that pie also don't know shit about technology in general, or seemingly, much of anything beyond a business degree? But irrespective of that, to the wider world who aren't in this and don't participate in the groups at hand... those are your representatives, by default. The attention economy has produced them and you have my most sincere sympathies for that.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#100

Post by vanviegen »

projektfu wrote: post #56
layer8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

How does what you're describing differ from polymorphism, or from doing OOP in loosely typed languages like javascript?
Post reply on HN