Comment by arkj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkj | Hacker News Reader

>Software 2.0 are the weights which program neural networks. >I think it's a fundamental change, is that neural networks became programmable with large libraries... And in my mind, it's worth giving it the designation of a Software 3.0.

I think it's a bit early to change your mind here. We love your 2.0, let's wait for some more time till th e dust settles so we can see clearly and up the revision number.

In fact I'm a bit confused about the number AK has in mind. Anyone else knows how he arrived at software 2.0?

I remember a talk by professor Sussman where he suggest we don't know how to compute, yet[1].

I was thinking he meant this,

Software 0.1 - Machine Code/Assembly Code Software 1.0 - HLLs with Compilers/Interpreters/Libraries Software 2.0 - Language comprehension with LLMs

If we are calling weights 2.0 and NN with libraries as 3.0, then shouldn't we account for functional and oo programming in the numbering scheme?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI

Objectivity is lacking throughout the entire talk, not only in the thesis. But objectivity isn't very good for building hype.

Reminds me of Vitalik Buterin. I spent a lot of my starry-eyed youth reading his blog, and was hopeful that he was applying the learned-lessons from the early days of Bitcoin. Turned out he was fighting the wrong war though, and today Ethereum gets less lip service than your average shitcoin. The whole industry went up in flames, really.

Nerds are good at the sort of reassuring arithmetic that can make people confident in an idea or investment. But oftentimes that math misses the forest for the trees, and we're left betting the farm on a profoundly bad idea like Theranos or DogTV. Hey, I guess that's why it's called Venture Capital and not Recreation Investing.

I'm curious why you think that? I thought the talk was pretty grounded. There was a lot of skepticism of using LLMs unbounded to write software and an insistence on using ground truth free from LLM hallucination. The main thesis, to me, seemed like "we need to write software that was designed with human-centric APIs and UI patterns to now use an LLM layer in front and that'll be a lot of opportunity for software engineers to come."

If anything it seemed like the middle ground between AI boosters and doomers.

It's a lot of meandering and mundane analogies that don't work very well or explain much, so it's totally understandable that so many people have different interpretations of what he's even trying to say. The only consistent takeaway here is that he's talking about using AI (of many sorts) alongside legacy software.

How can someone so smart become a hype machine? I can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe he had the opportunity to learn from someone he worked closely with?

> How can someone so smart become a hype machine? I can’t wrap my head around it.

Maybe they didn't, and it's just your perception.

Probably true.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair

Maybe you haven't seen the frontier and envisioned the possibilities?

Maybe the emperor wears no clothes. I'll believe it when I see it.

The death of deterministic computing and unverifiable information is a horror show

I think to understand how Andrej views 3.0 is hinted at with his later analogy at Tesla. He saw a ton of manually written Software 1.0 C++ replaced by the weights of the NN. What we used to write manually in explicit code is now incorporated into the NN itself, moving the implementation from 1.0 to 3.0.

"revision number" doesn't matter. He is just saying that traditional software's behaviour ("software 1.0") is defined by its code, whereas outputs produced by a model ("software 2.0") are driven by its training data. But to be fair I stopped reading after that, so can't tell you what "software 3.0" is.

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