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What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

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Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#141

Post by lucianbr »

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.

Is that something that didn't apply to the internet when it was invented? This is just another way of saying "LLMs are an unprecedented technological leap", which is repeated ad nauseam these days, and personally I a not convinced. Again, this is orthogonal to the "strip mine society" concern.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#142

Post by lucianbr »

titzer wrote: post #46
mempko wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs seem like a new and dangerous tool to scale the bullshit-generation machine to unimaginable levels. Pretty soon it will be impossible to trust any digital information, as every image, recording, video, document, etc can be instantly altered, adjusted, or completely fabricated by ungodly powerful generative AIs.

Must every other comment be "LLMs will change everything"? No, we will not "soon have ungodly powerful generative AIs". At least, it's not likely.

When we landed on the moon, people thought we would soon have Mars bases or even colonize other solar systems, yet here we are, 60 years later. It's naive to think every technology goes strictly on an exponential upward curve. Reality isn't that simple or repetitive, really.

And, no, it's not "different this time". Every time people think it is different this time, and it never is. We don't have flying cars, hypersonic jets, molecular assemblers, AGI. We won't have them tomorrow either, just because Sam Altman says so.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#143

Post by devjab »

bongodongobob wrote: post #32
samatman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, that's my experience as well. Python, C, C++, bash, PowerShell, etc, are all pretty much spot on 95/% of the time. It will start to fumble if I specify PS 4.0, or Python 2, C89, etc. Or use X language but don't use popular library Y.

In my experience it depends a lot more on what you prompt it with rather than the language itself. As soon as you task it with something where your prompt doesn’t hit the right marks, I’ll go into its “inventive” mode and simply make stuff up. Copilot for enterprise is a little better in terms of not making things up, but the flip side of this is that it often simply provides a very, very, useless result.

My experience with it for Powershell hasn’t been as impressive as yours. It simply invented functions for the PnP module. Which I suppose isn’t in too much use these days, especially not against on-prem SharePoint. I’m not an expert on Powershell, however, and I really don’t think the documentation on things like PnP search queries is very good. So this was an area where I got to experience what it’s like to use these tools when you’re not the expert. In the end it was trial and error along with various shitty internet articles that helped me.

That being said. You can easily have GPT4 solve your CS exam questions, and likely whatever technical interview you’re given if you’re applying at jobs which do these things. And as such, I guess you could also argue that a lot of what we teach in CS is now even more dated than before. Because even if some of it is sort of useful for basic understanding, I’d bet money on students “cheating” their way through where they can. Because why wouldn’t they use the “calculator”?

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#145

Post by devinprater »

chongli wrote: post #36
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”.

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…

Holy crap that'd be amazing for accessibility! Open a menu and look at what the button does, label that button with the screen reader, pass around that label to others, and boom, labeled button.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#146

Post by gamacodre »

falsaberN1 wrote: post #140
chongli wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Try looking at things from my angle: A few errors in an image can be not much of a big deal (with modern tools, the mistakes are within human margin of error on average), but errors in delivery of textual data such as facts, dates or code can be far more severe and subtle. There are ways to work around or reduce the shortcomings of image generation, and the quirks you mention have drop-in solutions for local installs…

I think this is still just a difference in how the output is used. You're presenting text generation as factual and image generation as artistic. It could be reversed - no one will care if a fantasy story gets some in-milieu "facts" wrong, but a blueprint or architectural reference coming out of Stable Diffusion could ruin someone's year.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#147

Post by titzer »

lucianbr wrote: post #142
titzer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs seem like a new and dangerous tool to scale the bullshit-generation machine to unimaginable levels. Pretty soon it will be impossible to trust any digital information, as every image, recording, video, document, etc can be instantly altered, adjusted, or completely fabricated by ungodly powerful generative AIs.

Must every other comment be "LLMs will change everything"? No, we will not "soon have ungodly powerful generative AIs". At least, it's not likely. When we landed on the moon, people thought we would soon have Mars bases or even colonize other solar systems, yet here we are, 60 years later. It's naive to think every technology goes strictly on an exponential upward curve. Reality isn't that simple or repetitive, reall…

Bah, the only prediction I made is more bullshit on the Internet and I 100% standby this prediction.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#148

Post by ToucanLoucan »

fzzzy wrote: post #134
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Literacy isn't required if a computer can read any text. That is a huge amount of the brain that could be applied to something else.

I genuinely haven't in some time read an opinion so horrifying as this. Well done.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#149

Post by Phiwise_ »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #127
jdlshore wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[Citation Needed]

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#150

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #148
fzzzy wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literacy isn't required if a computer can read any text. That is a huge amount of the brain that could be applied to something else.

I genuinely haven't in some time read an opinion so horrifying as this. Well done.

Do you think it would have the same psychological impact if you had to ask your cell phone to read it to you?
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