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What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

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Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#111

Post by ein0p »

ribosometronome wrote: post #108
ein0p wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is difficult, yes. The way the game is played is a handful of large outlets promote themselves as “trusted” and then drown out everything else as “untrustworthy”. But the fly in the ointment for them is that even these large/sophisticated opinion manipulators (they shouldn’t be called news sources at this point) are inconsistent both over time and sometimes also in the moment. Today’s public short attention span prevents it from seeing such inconsistencies or from paying attention to the broader picture. But guess what today’s models easily outperform humans on? The ability to pay attention to more than a small handful of things for longer than a few minutes.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#112

Post by slaymaker1907 »

> If we look at human anthropology, we see a species that treats solitary confinement and banishment from society as punishments — we are a society because we can cooperate and trust a little — but when are safely back in society, we start competing like mad (and cheating like mad) as though the society is there to be strip-mined.

I really like this quote. We simultaneously value trust and community, yet so many people also treat it as just another resource to turn into money and power. Alan Kay is a real gem.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#113

Post by thesz »

pixl97 wrote: post #86
thesz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have to know what chain of reasoning is behind this or that fact and/or deduction. i would like to be able to verify that. For example, the proof of the absence of solution in SAT should be accompanied with the easily verifiable chain of reasoning. This shows the absence of incorrect deductions and missing assignments. Another example is autovectorization in contemporary compilers, they can show you why par…

Even you can't do that yourself. You can only mad post ad-hoc justifications for the choices you made.

What cannot I do myself? Look at the output of gcc -ftree-vectorizer-verbose=2? Run the verifier after picosat?

I did both.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#114

Post by semi-extrinsic »

mempko wrote: post #38
lucianbr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most tech seems to be used, at least amongst other things, to further strip mine society. It's the extreme of wealth accumulation, and there's always some people wanting to do that. Microsoft uses the idea of personal computers to get a monopoly on OSes, and get as much rent with that. Google and Amazon use the internet. Apple the iPhone with the walled garden. OPEC uses oil to extract as much wealth as possible. Toy…

It's not specific to LLMs, but the point is LLMs will make things more efficient and therefore make 'a bigger straw' to drink the milkshake.

Why will LLMs make things more efficient?

As I see it, LLMs have the potential to either reduce the amount of "bullshit jobs/tasks", reduce the amount of time programmers spend on boilerplate, etc.

But those inefficiencies are 95% human made, on purpose. Bullshit tasks are made up because middle managers want more underlings. Languages/frameworks with lots of boilerplate exist because companies would rather hire fifty average programmers rather than ten brilliant ones.

Even if LLMs have the potential to make these things more efficient, the people holding the money bags don't want the inefficiencies removed.

Consider influencers. What they post on social media could 100% be replaced by the outputs of LLMs and diffusion models. It would be vastly more efficient for companies to advertise their products by creating text and images about a pretty person using their products in an exotic location, than to pay for airplane tickets and hotels and salary for an influencer. Yet we don't see even a hint of the "influencer revenue crisis" that this would cause.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#115

Post by thesz »

pixl97 wrote: post #86
thesz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have to know what chain of reasoning is behind this or that fact and/or deduction. i would like to be able to verify that. For example, the proof of the absence of solution in SAT should be accompanied with the easily verifiable chain of reasoning. This shows the absence of incorrect deductions and missing assignments. Another example is autovectorization in contemporary compilers, they can show you why par…

Even you can't do that yourself. You can only mad post ad-hoc justifications for the choices you made.

To illustrate: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566

One can teach LLM to write good code now and bad code in future (when everyone lower their guards). And no one can prove who and how made LLM to do that. Also, no one can prove formally the absence of such a plant.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#116

Post by sebastianconcpt »

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.

Just adding here that the understanding of the forces at play in a cultural war makes what you just said even more clear and for a vast spectrum of fields way beyond IT.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#117

Post by jhbadger »

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…

It's somewhat of a backhanded compliment though -- calling Erlang a "modern assembly" is like the quip that C is a "portable assembler" -- that is, a tool useful for low-level stuff but which you should mostly use to implement higher level languages on top of.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#118

Post by bsaul »

brookst wrote: post #81
halayli wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superstition is assuming a causation when you identify a correlation.

Often followed by applying confirmation bias to see correlations when there are none.

i think this is the part of superstition. Reproductive, effective, correlation is the start of a scientific path to true discoveries. Superstition only begins when the correlation has never truly never been observed, but only repeated from generations to generations without any other kind of justification other than "that's what i heard".

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#119

Post by wizzwizz4 »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #104
adamrezich wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then, maybe, we can re-invent libraries. (https://xkcd.com/1909/)

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#120

Post by layer8 »

carapace wrote: post #31
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.

You are impressively wrong. He just wrapped up an incredible research program that demonstrated many concrete implementations of great computing ideas. > After 16 years of continuous research and important contributions toward its mission - "Improve 'powerful ideas education' for the world's children and to advance the state of systems research and personal computing" - Viewpoints Research Institute concluded its ope…

And what exactly is the output, other than talks and some programming learning tools for children? I haven't seen any significant new insights or advances.
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