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

41–50 of 155 posts

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#41

Post by tjr »

altruios wrote: post #7
dpflan wrote: post #4

There is a lot in here, various paths to venture off, but the bottom line seems to be trust is important when running commands on a machine, and LLMs are not trustable. What else?

what would be required for trusting an LLM? 1: 100% transparency. Open Source code, fully (and correctly) attributed training data. 2: A predictable model of what these models are actually encoding (so that hypothetical new models (or modifications) can be reasoned about).

I would add, repeatable / reproducible results. Given the same input, you get the same output every time. If the input includes some sort of random seed for the express purpose of getting different output intentionally, then so be it, but I can't trust a program that I never know what it will do in response to what I tell it.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#42

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #21
falsaberN1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transparency won't help a lot from a technical standpoint (seems more like a solution to a legal issue than a technical one). I can't trust LLMs because they just...recombine text by probabilities and aren't deterministic. I get incorrect information every time I ask them a thing, and it's incorrect in different ways every time. The only things they seem to get consistently correct are very widespread facts that are…

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…

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.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#43

Post by LightFog »

mempko wrote: post #25

I see a lot of people here are missing his "big deal" which he talks about in the end where he references the "Spaceship Earth" problem. What I believe he is getting at is people are going to use LLMs to build systems at scale to further strip mine society. The "Spaceship Earth" problem is a reference to Limits to Growth. For those who haven't read "Limits to Growth", and the more recent Re-calibration of Limits to G…

This stood out to me too - the technology helping us move toward a ‘greed singularity’.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#44

Post by hintymad »

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”.

SmallTalk? Even though the language is mainstream, its many ideas, including implementation and design style using message passing, are embedded in many languages and software packages.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#45

Post by yourapostasy »

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…

I wonder if all of that was in an operating system as described but backed by Nix so we accomplish the NixOS-style reproducibility and configuration time travel, what the developer experience and user experience would be like. Instead of binary blob images, we'd have Nix declaratives and flakes we dissect at will, without fear of wedging the system with the live modifications we make.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#46

Post by titzer »

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.

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.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#47

Post by satellite2 »

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…

A browser kind of fit the requirements.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#48

Post by asdajksah2123 »

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.

If he said "use Erlang" then that eliminates the actual message he's trying to convey, which is message passing is good.

I bet if he simply said "use Erlang", 99% of headlines and discussion would be "Alan Kay said Erlang is the greatest language evah!"

I do appreciate that he respects his audience, ie me, enough that he thinks we can read "message passing is good" and go from there to choosing a message passing language that is suitable for our needs, or even using a non message passing language due to other factors, but recognizing that OOP is about message passing and not state encapsulation, which would impact how I code even in Java.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#49

Post by yourapostasy »

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…

I wonder if all of that was in an operating system as described but backed by Nix so we accomplish the NixOS-style reproducibility and configuration time travel, what the developer experience and user experience would be like. Instead of binary blob images, we'd have Nix declaratives and flakes we dissect at will, without fear of wedging the system with the live modifications we make.

Our hardware is sufficiently capable enough these days that I'm curious if we can do this to conventional Smalltalk and Common Lisp system/machine designs to re-imagine them, and bring back a level of tight feedback looped developer experience that has gone underground in the mainstream.

Re: What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?

#50

Post by pests »

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.

> He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.

How is inventing Smalltalk and putting his ideas into reality just "waxing around" or "complaining"?

Post reply on HN