He's always been a 'close to the metal' kind of guy, for example "While studying physics at Case, Knuth was introduced to the IBM 650, an early commercial compu

He's always been a 'close to the metal' kind of guy, for example "While studying physics at Case, Knuth was introduced to the IBM 650, an early commercial computer. After reading the computer's manual, Knuth decided to rewrite the assembly and compiler code for the machine used in his school, because he believed he could do it better." This was when he was like 19 or 20 years old. My real opinion is that he's mainly or even exclusively interested in systems that he can simulate completely within his own brain. He's not going to be doing that with GPT-4.