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What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

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Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#121

Post by PCMPSTR »

This part of his answer:

> A key part of their design was to not allow direct sending of commands — only bits could be sent. This means that (other) software inside each physical computer has the responsibility to interpret the bits, and the power to do (or not do) some action

seems, at least on a basic reading, to contradict this famous little argument (or maybe trolling?) he had on HN with Rich Hickey where he seems to be suggesting that one shouldn't just send raw bits, but also a little interpreter along with the data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722

Maybe this is an inevitable consequence of always speaking so abstractly/vaguely, but it also makes it difficult to know what exactly he's suggesting the industry, that he is so routinely critical of, should concretely do next.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#123

Post by discreteevent »

PCMPSTR wrote: post #121

This part of his answer: > A key part of their design was to not allow direct sending of commands — only bits could be sent. This means that (other) software inside each physical computer has the responsibility to interpret the bits, and the power to do (or not do) some action seems, at least on a basic reading, to contradict this famous little argument (or maybe trolling?) he had on HN with Rich Hickey where he seem…

The main point he was making in that argument is that data is nothing without an interpreter. Sending an interpreter with the days is secondary. Rich hickey was saying that data is meaningful on its own. But that makes no sense.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#124

Post by r00fus »

pixl97 wrote: post #74
r00fus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you ensure any bits of data? You going to fist fight your uncle at the next family reunion when he promises you pigs can actually fly? There are plenty of bits of data that can be hard references to datasets or actual physics to assign their probability value. And there are other things that can't.

Completely inefficient to chain logic through LLMs if they aren't baseline reliable.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#125

Post by fzzzy »

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…

It's incredibly easy to build hypermedia as the engine of application state sites. You generate html pages with state in them, and hyperlinks and forms that filter and change the state.

Hateoas didn't invent anything. He literally just described how web 1.0 worked.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#126

Post by sfpotter »

Phiwise_ wrote: post #110
sfpotter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

What are you even talking about?

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#127

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

jdlshore wrote: post #80
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

You’re saying this like it’s a “gotcha,” which makes me believe you’re confusing OOP-as-practiced-in-enterprise with OOP-as-invented-by-Kay. The sad truth is that most great ideas are doomed to drown in a sea of mediocrity and misinterpretation.

I'm not confusing anything. OOP is a horribly OOT over-engineering of a problem looking for a solution, from the get go. That it morphed and twisted into a bloated mess when it was taken up by people who didn't get it to begin with is just the inevitable result of starting with a big pile of no need to do all that in the first place.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#128

Post by fzzzy »

vajrabum wrote: post #13
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.

If smalltalk is late binding and message passing, I think it's interesting that modern large scale webapps (say Netflix or Google) do just that just not inside process and server boundaries. I'd guess that Alan Kay would think that's a bastardization, and there are loads of complications but it's a definite improvement over the large php ball of mud monolith you might have seen at say Box or Facebook 10-15 years ago.…

I don't think he would think it is a bastardization. HTTP is 100% message passing. You have an object reference (url) and you pass a message to it with POST. State and behavior is encapsulated. In fact, one of the desireable properties of message passing is that it is easy to distribute across process and machine boundaries.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#129

Post by Phiwise_ »

satellite2 wrote: post #47
chongli wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s not just a proponent of message passing, he’s a proponent of late binding [1]. The idea there is to have a running image of the environment and interact with it in real time, updating code while it’s running (no recompiling or anything like that). The idea is a high level of interactivity with very tight feedback loops. A whole operating system like this would allow you to hack on the user interface and change t…

A browser kind of fit the requirements.

Kay himself does regularly describe the Arpanet as one of the inspurations for OO, and the modern interbet browser as an incomplete implementation of the same ideas: https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#130

Post by fzzzy »

vanviegen wrote: post #100
projektfu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Every single object in smalltalk is free to have its own implementation of handling a message. In javascript, the runtime decides for the object how to locate the code and how to call it.
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