Ask HN: Why didn't Don Knuth test ChatGPT himself? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why didn't Don Knuth test ChatGPT himself?

3 pointsamichail6 comments

Why did he give his questions to a grad student to do the testing?

As I posted on a different version of this thread, it's grad school's "royal we" in action. Profs have ideas, grad students implement. It's not 100% but that was the way it tended to work in ancient times and this seems to suggest it's still the case.

Which isn't unreasonable, as 2nd year grad students have almost infinite enthusiasm coupled to not always knowing what is and isn't possible. Interesting things can come from these kinds of people.

He has people for that kind of thing. Probably he doesn't want to sign up like giving them his email or phone number or whatever they want. Also he is negatively disposed towards the LLMs if you have read what he thinks about them. Maybe he doesn't want to tempt himself to put 'big tiddy robot gf' in the textbox and then that's everywhere in the news, that Don Knuth typed that.

How could any computer scientist not be curious enough to experiment with ChatGPT himself/herself?

I think he is by default less interested in gigantic black box systems that he can't fit in his head, and that secondly he has read Gary Marcus thinkpiece and was persuaded by him, and thirdly I feel like there might be some kind of religion thing but I don't have direct evidence of that third one.

Here is what Knuth has said, related to why he isn't as curious as you might expect:

> "Gary Marcus's column in the April CACM brilliantly describes the terrifying consequences of these developments. [...] 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. [...] The topic [LLMs] is timely, and important enough not to ignore completely, but it's emphatically not for me."

I'll link to my comment in another thread about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36023814

He doesn't use that much modern tech really, for example email https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

Using ChatGPT would require engaging with email and maybe more stuff that he's not inclined to

Reply on news.ycombinator.com