[manquer]

What do you expect ? He is one the person in the world who has most the earned the right to take that attitude .

Both Knuth and GPTs are aggregators and presenters of knowledge, Knuth is however the antithesis of a LLM .

He has painstakingly spent years to make sure not a single mistake, not even a typo is there in material he publishes , he has devoted years developing a better typesetting so he can present his material accurately.

His obsession with accuracy is unparalleled and his dedication and mastery over communication to explain complex topics precisely and with an approachability that no one else comes close to .

He has strived for perfection all his life and not been far of the mark .ChatGPT for its all powers will never share that idealogy,

so I am more surprised that he was complimentary at all, and actually appreciated many of its skills

[fnordpiglet]

That’s actually not exactly my point - my point is his lack of curiosity … 3.5’s answered poorly but sounded convincing. But his dismissiveness of the potential and future advances bothered me.

[manquer]

He is 85! I would hope to be that disciplined about what what I can spend time on at that age

He was curious enough to spend some time on it and was worried it would sink more of his time with all the sub problems it is presented and asks specifically Stephan wolfram to disengage on this

He talks about his preference of working with authentic and trustworthy .

Maybe a younger Knuth may have spent more time , but I perhaps think not that likely really .

This is simply not a area of interest for him, he does truly understand the impact and potential - When he talks about novelists not capturing precursors to singularity and how millions of people have access to 0.01 % intelligence for free .

I don’t think he is dismissive of its potential and future , he is not working on everything that can change the world in computing just his areas of interest.

Perhaps you (I am certainly) disappointed that someone of Knuth’s stature is not going to spend time on an emerging field and that’s what really bothers us..