He is still alive (I think?) you could just ask him. I doubt he is sad as much as he is excited. Computer scientists are not SWEs worried about losing their careers.
He is still alive (I think?) you could just ask him. I doubt he is sad as much as he is excited. Computer scientists are not SWEs worried about losing their careers.
He’s still here. In fact, in December he gave his annual Christmas lecture, and last month he was a guest at a Computer History Museum event.
Excited? I doubt that. I'm guessing you haven't read his books.
He seems pretty fascinated with the possibilities.
https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt
"I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same. Best regards, Don"
There's more than one cherry to pick if one needs Mr. Knuth to have a purely-negative opinion about LLMs, but naturally any fascination is offset by the same concerns that any sane technologist has. In any case, it's all in his post.
The techno pessimists on HN are probably not PhDs in computer science. I don’t think they understand what it takes to get there, and how it shapes your thinking afterwards.
Neither Wolf nor Knuth are PhDs in Computer Science, yet many would agree that both understand "what it takes to get there" as do many others who else live sans a PhD in Comp. Sci.
Needlessly pedantic.
Knuth's PhD is in mathematics, like Alan Turing, and many other significant computer scientists.
> Needlessly pedantic.
You don't have to pre warn readers about your comments here, we're all needlessly pedantic.
That aside, the guts of this sub branch is the correlation between {techno pessimists on HN} and {people qualified to understand LLM's (workings and implications)}.
Personally I wouldn't limit set two to "PhDs in computer science" or even accept that {all PhD's in Comp Sci} is a subset of set two, as I made clear with my comment, nor would I argue a lack of overlap between sets one and two.
I'm interested to hear where you stand.
Hopefully some are visionary enough to be dismayed that the endgame of their field is the acceleration of slop and fraud, the end of customer service, and the end of the reading of full, original documents.
I can't imagine being excited about any of that unless I was trying to make money from it.
> the end of the reading of full, original documents
That's one that always gets me: people who use LLMs to summarize everything. It's like, bro, how lazy are you that you can't be bothered to read a handful of paragraphs of text? That takes all of 30 seconds. I can understand trying to get a computer to summarize a document which is dozens of pages long (though I would be concerned about hallucinations), but a lot of the tasks people use LLMs for are really easy already.