Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

Great talk, thanks for putting it online so quickly. I liked the idea of making the generation / verification loop go brrr, and one way to do this is to make verification not just a human task, but a machine task, where possible.

Yes, I am talking about formal verification, of course!

That also goes nicely together with "keeping the AI on a tight leash". It seems to clash though with "English is the new programming language". So the question is, can you hide the formal stuff under the hood, just like you can hide a calculator tool for arithmetic? Use informal English on the surface, while some of it is interpreted as a formal expression, put to work, and then reflected back in English? I think that is possible, if you have a formal language and logic that is flexible enough, and close enough to informal English.

Yes, I am talking about abstraction logic [1], of course :-)

So the goal would be to have English (German, ...) as the ONLY programming language, invisibly backed underneath by abstraction logic.

[1] http://abstractionlogic.com

This thread perfectly captures what Karpathy was getting at. We're witnessing a fundamental shift where the interface to computing is changing from formal syntax to natural language. But you can see people struggling to let go of the formal foundations they've built their careers on.

This is why I call all this AI stuff BS.

Using a formal language is a feature, not a bug. It is a cornerstone of all human engineering and scientific activity and is the _reason_ why these disciplines are successful.

What you are describing (ie. ditching formal and using natural language) is moving humanity back towards magical thinking, shamanism and witchcraft.

> Using a formal language is a feature, not a bug. It is a cornerstone of all human engineering and scientific activity and is the _reason_ why these disciplines are successful

A similar argument was also made by Dijkstra in this brief essay here [1] - which is timely to this debate of why "english is the new programming language" is not well-founded.

I quote a brief snippet here:

"The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid."

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...