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What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

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Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#101

Post by Phiwise_ »

alexvoda wrote: post #91
Phiwise_ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If only. Unix would be dead and buried many years ago if it was just a fad. It's far more like the old repeating fertility rituals of many paganistic societies, where your neighbors burn your pagus down to cleanse the village of the spite of the undead grain god if you plowed your heath in a different direction from everyone else.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#102

Post by detourdog »

layer8 wrote: post #20
detourdog wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think trustability is pretty specific and without a foundation of trust the rest of the effort”s value is unknowable.

That’s “what we would like to have” (so mostly just a criticism that we don’t have it), but without much of a suggestion of how to actually achieve it in practice.

The current industry leaders of the effort want to proclaim that it is impossible to know where the answers come from. If that is the industry norm then I understand how achieving trustability could be mysterious.

My line of thinking is that without an audit trail of thoughts there won't be any trustability. I'm unable to describe in detail what any one specific thing leads to trustability. I can say that being able to demonstrate where answers come from would work for me.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#103

Post by swyx »

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?!?

when you're alan kay you can literally just title things in the third person and it'd get read haha

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#104

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

adamrezich wrote: post #51
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

One of the worst-case scenarios I can presently imagine for LLMs is a world so drowned in semi-plausible nonsense that new generations teach themselves to simply ignore the printed word, subconsciously categorizing it as noise, and in so doing essentially un-invent literacy.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#105

Post by theGnuMe »

layer8 wrote: post #23
theGnuMe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True message passing is one of the key ideas behind smalltalk which would improve computer security considerably. This is analogous to the design of the internet that he references. The internet scales well. So imagine building entire computing systems this way.

How would it improve it, though? Dynamically-typed languages tend to introduce gradual typing after a while to increase reliability and predictability, and the end game of that (static typing) is the antithesis of late binding. Message passing only improves security by adding a validation layer, but managed languages (JVM, CLR, etc.) effectively do the same. > The internet scales well. So imagine building entire comp…

It’d be a big improvement. Rather than call a linked library function you’d send a message to whatever it was you needed the library function for.. this reduces the buffer overflow exploit potential and what not. That alone is a huge win.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#106

Post by discreteevent »

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.

Here's an excellent recent comment along the same lines (in response to whether our intelligence is statistically based like LLMs):

> mjburgess 9 days ago

Suppose you touch a fireplace once, do you touch it again? No.

OK, here's something much stranger. Suppose you see your friend touch the fireplace, he recoils in pain. Do you touch it? No.

Hmm... whence statistics? There is no frequency association here, in either case. And in the second, even no experience of the fireplace.

The entire history of science is supposed to be about the failure of statistics to produce explanations. It is a great sin that we have allowed pseudosciences to flourish in which this lesson isnt even understood; and worse, to allow statistical showmen with their magic lanterns to preach on the scientific method. To a point where it seems, almost, science as an ideal has been completely lost.

The entire point was to throw away entirely our reliance on frequency and association -- this is ancient superstition. And instead, to explain the world by necessary mechanisms born of causal properties which interact in complex ways that can never uniquely reveal themselves by direct measurement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39661963

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#107

Post by sfpotter »

Phiwise_ wrote: post #75
kergonath wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

A road trip by random walk is also a kind of empiricism that can be tested. This does not imply it is worth the energy to actually do.

A road trip by random walk is a valuable experience, the kind most people on HN lack.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#108

Post by ribosometronome »

ein0p wrote: post #98
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…

Are context windows not long enough to do this for most news articles and forum posts nowadays? I'd've thought the issue would be finding the relevant and reliable sources of truth for comparison would be the difficult part.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#109

Post by stana »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #66
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 :|

Can we trust it though that is what Alan Kay would say?

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#110

Post by Phiwise_ »

sfpotter wrote: post #107
Phiwise_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A road trip by random walk is also a kind of empiricism that can be tested. This does not imply it is worth the energy to actually do.

A road trip by random walk is a valuable experience, the kind most people on HN lack.

Call me crazy, but I don't think the goal of AI should be to give the rock with electricity in it "a valuable experience".
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