[simonw]

https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt is a conversation between Knuth and Wolfram about GPT-4.

> I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a "singularity" in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

> 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.

[ghssds]

> not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

Aren't Asimov's Multivac stories basicaly this? Humans build a powerful computer with a conversational interface helping them doing all kind of science and stuff, then before they know they become Multivac's pets.

[sethev]

I don't know why but it makes me smile that he did this experiment by having a grad student type the questions for chatgpt and copy the results.

[rramadass]

That link is great!

Knuth has a beautiful way of writing systematically (as can be expected of the inventor of "Literate Programming").

[atomic128]

That's related. Thank you for posting it.

But what does Knuth think of "vibe coding" or "agentic coding"?

What does he think of "The Dawn of the Dark Ages of Computer Programming"?

[jacquesm]

I don't think Knuth needs to stoop that low. He actually knows what he's doing.