←back to thread

Interview with gwern

(www.dwarkeshpatel.com)
308 points synthmeat | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 08:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
Show context
YeGoblynQueenne ◴[14 Nov 24 13:22 UTC] No.42135916[source]▶
This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620

Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, large, section of the community as an important influencer in AI. For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS and only have second-hand knowledge, which I guess they're good at organising and popularising, but not more than that. It's easy to be a cheer leader for the mainstream view on AI. The hard part is finding, and following, unique directions.

With apologies again for the negative slant of the comment.

replies(10): >>42136055 #>>42136148 #>>42136538 #>>42136759 #>>42137041 #>>42137215 #>>42137274 #>>42137284 #>>42137350 #>>42137636 #
1. wyager ◴[14 Nov 24 15:46 UTC] No.42137350[source]▶
It seems like his objection is that "parsing formal grammars" isn't the point of LLMs, which is fair. He was wrong about RGs vs CFGs, but I would bet that the majority of programmers are not familiar with the distinction, and learning the classification of a^nb^n is a classic homework problem in automata theory specifically because it's surprising that such a simple grammar is CF.