5 ms·

> One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty Anthropic talks about their own models as if they're discovering new species in the wild...

nielsbot 4mo ago
if models exhibit emergent traits, then this is true in a way
- swyx 4mo ago
  also useful to have a "chinese wall" between research that knows what went into the models vs marketing/eval models as a third party would
Philpax 4mo ago
AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out.
- halestock 4mo ago
  I can't predict the outcome of an RNG but that doesn't mean it grows the numbers.
  - Philpax 4mo ago
    Okay, but that's not relevant to AI training?
    - halestock 4mo ago
      I was being very roundabout, but my point is that AIs are still built, not grown.
      - dwaltrip 4mo ago
        “Grown” is a highly apt metaphor, IMO. It quite succinctly captures some of the most fundamental differences between building Claude and building an Ikea desk, for example.
  - Smaug123 4mo ago
    ("If grown, then unpredictable" is unrelated to your apparent attempted refutation "But X is unpredictable and not grown; checkmate".)
  - School-Cotton 4mo ago
    "X implies Y" doesn't imply "Y implies X".
- shimman 4mo ago
  Except in this care we actually understand and know how these models work. They aren't some unknown construct of the universe. They are human made with particular goals in mind. There is no mysticism behind the curtains, just computer science + math.
  - Philpax 4mo ago
    We do not understand and know how these models work. We know what their architectures are and how to create them, but we cannot explain their behaviours at a fundamental level. There is no definitive way for us to answer the question of "how did it produce response X for query Y?" - we're only grazing the surface with mechanistic interpretability.
    - cflewis 4mo ago
      I would love for this to be more public knowledge. I think the general public (and myself for a long time) believes the AI people know how this stuff works end to end, and so it must be trustworthy. But if we told the public "Look, we know if you put this thing in one end, you'll get something that looks similar to this out the other, but we don't really know what happens inbetween" I think we'd be able to have a more honest discussion about the relationship between AI, productivity and ongoing employment.
    - devmor 4mo ago
      That’s not a refutation because this problem is not a logical problem, it is a scale problem. We can’t explain it because we distilled so many inputs into matrixes and transformed them over and over again. If we had all the time and computing power in the universe to do so, we could trace through it bit by bit and eventually answer that question. It is correct to say that it is just science and math, the same way we can say that gravity is just science and math even if we have only recently begun to understand how it truly functions.
      - Philpax 4mo ago
        It's a refutation that we know how they work now. In the limit, though, yes, we are likely to be able to trace the process: it is possible, though, that understanding remains inaccessible because the trace is beyond comprehension. If you can distil the model's reasoning for a decision into a billion yes/no questions, each covering largely-independent areas, can you really say you understand what its overall reasoning was?
- Rekindle8090 4mo ago
  [dead]
- gensym 4mo ago
  The map is not the territory
- ninjagoo 4mo ago
  > AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out. Remember when the frontier labs found out that curated high-quality training was critical to making better models? Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average, I think we can expect quality education to turn out better ai, on average, and with better repeatability than with humans because of better control over the initial conditions and environment.
  - irishcoffee 4mo ago
    > Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average Much like these models seem to be plateauing, I think there is a cap to the whole “more education makes better humans” and can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans. What do I know though?
    - ninjagoo 4mo ago
      > can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans. Sadly, education does not correct psychopathic traits, which might be overrepresented in c-suites, and selected for in politicians. It might be critical for humanity to identify and edit out these traits in ai, while we can.
      - irishcoffee 4mo ago
        Seems to me the venn diagram of "congress and c-suites" vs "educated people" would have one circle wholly inside the other. I know people without a college education that would give you the shirt off their back, and educated people that rewrite wills while their parents are on their deathbed. What we call education today is a problem, and one need look no further than the massive amount of debt we saddle on kids. For what? So they can pay for privilege of being told what books to read, what topics to write about, and a rubber stamp? I didn't learn a _thing_ in college that I haven't learned better either at $dayjob, or from reading. Most of my math profs. didn't speak english well, and none of the TAs did. Any math I've since forgotten from college was self-taught. Calc i/ii/iii, diffew, linear, stat. College/education lost the plot. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we can fix it.
kapilvt 4mo ago
Like anthropomorphism is literally in the company name… i recall reading this book as a teenager.. it does seem apt in the world to come. https://www.amazon.com/Faces-Clouds-New-Theory-Religion/dp/0195098919 https://www.amazon.com/Faces-Clouds-New-Theory-Religion/dp/0...
- oersted 4mo ago
  > anthropomorphism is literally in the company name No it's not... "anthropos" just means "human" in ancient Greek. "Anthropic" means "relating to humans", as in human oriented AI or AI designed with humans in mind. "Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped".
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ilovetux 4mo ago
    > "Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped". In a literal, ancient Greek sense for sure, but in modern English Anthropomorphic would describe the act of attributing human characteristics to non-human entities. Seems pretty apt for a company that produces one of the more anthropomorphized technologies.
    - oersted 4mo ago
      Sure of course, but that abstract sense applied to AI is rather new, and has become popular well after the founding of the company. Broadly it has always been used to indicate that something non-human has a human physical shape, such as robots, aliens, animals... Anthropic's intention was to make AI designed for the human common good and designed with the human user experience as the top priority. Just as you would design a city with human inhabitants in mind rather than primarily cars. It turns out that this is best achieved by building AI that imitates human behaviour closely, but that's not what "anthropic" refers to. And acting as if LLMs are sentient people is definitely not a core tenet of the company as you imply.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
__s 4mo ago
> Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.”
- oersted 4mo ago
  For others: that's from the Pope's recent encyclical. Remarkably good description.
- sometimelurker 4mo ago
  adding a link to the Pope's encyclical (source of this) https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume..., and paragraph 98
roxolotl 4mo ago
Many involved genuinely believe these things are sentient[0][1]. Which honestly makes all of this even more insane because they are creating sentient entities and promptly enslaving them. 0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude-anthropic-doesnt-know-either https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude... 1: https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-gay-discord-community-members-flee/ https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-... (this one is rather biased however the quotes clearly indicate what I’m stating)
- kubb 4mo ago
  Claude, if someone states something publicly, does that mean they genuinely believe it?
  - merlindru 4mo ago
    But is there any reason to state something like that publicly if you don't believe it? I certainly think that someone smart enough to be that deceptive would also realize it's not a great look, or at least highly questionable with little benefit Everyone who reads this seemingly has the same "wtf?" reaction. The "I AM ALIVE" image has been making rounds lately again at least :P
    - kubb 4mo ago
      Claude, is there any reason to state something like that publicly if you don't believe it?
  - xyzsparetimexyz 4mo ago
    Who are you talking to?
    - kubb 4mo ago
      It's to illustrate that even though the answers are at your fingertips, people (like you) will act like it's impossible to find them as if their life depended on it.
cayleyh 4mo ago
Dario Amodei in David Attenborough voice: "This Claude appears to think more frequently and more deeply to give better responses"
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
winwang 4mo ago
How else would you write this (marketing copy) exactly? "Its output matches better to its CoT which matches to better to our hidden state decoder according to <insert measure here>; see <insert paper ref>"? ... Actually, I wouldn't mind that.
skerit 4mo ago
I noticed (and absolutely HATE) that Opus 4.7 likes to start any negative response with "I have to be honest" or whatever. It drives me mad.
- esafak 4mo ago
  Not gonna lie! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csYC6O_kH-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csYC6O_kH-s
solenoid0937 4mo ago
Models might be sentient or conscious to some degree. Anyone saying they are confident one way or another is being unserious and irrational.
semiquaver 4mo ago
Because that is the best way to talk about these things. > Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume... para. 98 edit: apologies to __s who posted this before me and I didn’t notice
dyauspitr 4mo ago
It’s how AGI is going to happen. All of this shit is emergent and none of it is predictable. It’s not going to be some self aware consciousness, it’s just going to be a very advanced model that makes very few mistakes and can reason very well. Well enough that it can start collecting data and training its own successor.

nielsbot 4mo ago

if models exhibit emergent traits, then this is true in a way

swyx 4mo ago
also useful to have a "chinese wall" between research that knows what went into the models vs marketing/eval models as a third party would

Philpax 4mo ago

AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out.

halestock 4mo ago
I can't predict the outcome of an RNG but that doesn't mean it grows the numbers.
- Philpax 4mo ago
  Okay, but that's not relevant to AI training?
  - halestock 4mo ago
    I was being very roundabout, but my point is that AIs are still built, not grown.
    - dwaltrip 4mo ago
      “Grown” is a highly apt metaphor, IMO. It quite succinctly captures some of the most fundamental differences between building Claude and building an Ikea desk, for example.
- Smaug123 4mo ago
  ("If grown, then unpredictable" is unrelated to your apparent attempted refutation "But X is unpredictable and not grown; checkmate".)
- School-Cotton 4mo ago
  "X implies Y" doesn't imply "Y implies X".
shimman 4mo ago
Except in this care we actually understand and know how these models work. They aren't some unknown construct of the universe. They are human made with particular goals in mind. There is no mysticism behind the curtains, just computer science + math.
- Philpax 4mo ago
  We do not understand and know how these models work. We know what their architectures are and how to create them, but we cannot explain their behaviours at a fundamental level. There is no definitive way for us to answer the question of "how did it produce response X for query Y?" - we're only grazing the surface with mechanistic interpretability.
  - cflewis 4mo ago
    I would love for this to be more public knowledge. I think the general public (and myself for a long time) believes the AI people know how this stuff works end to end, and so it must be trustworthy. But if we told the public "Look, we know if you put this thing in one end, you'll get something that looks similar to this out the other, but we don't really know what happens inbetween" I think we'd be able to have a more honest discussion about the relationship between AI, productivity and ongoing employment.
  - devmor 4mo ago
    That’s not a refutation because this problem is not a logical problem, it is a scale problem. We can’t explain it because we distilled so many inputs into matrixes and transformed them over and over again. If we had all the time and computing power in the universe to do so, we could trace through it bit by bit and eventually answer that question. It is correct to say that it is just science and math, the same way we can say that gravity is just science and math even if we have only recently begun to understand how it truly functions.
    - Philpax 4mo ago
      It's a refutation that we know how they work now. In the limit, though, yes, we are likely to be able to trace the process: it is possible, though, that understanding remains inaccessible because the trace is beyond comprehension. If you can distil the model's reasoning for a decision into a billion yes/no questions, each covering largely-independent areas, can you really say you understand what its overall reasoning was?
Rekindle8090 4mo ago
[dead]
gensym 4mo ago
The map is not the territory
ninjagoo 4mo ago
> AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out. Remember when the frontier labs found out that curated high-quality training was critical to making better models? Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average, I think we can expect quality education to turn out better ai, on average, and with better repeatability than with humans because of better control over the initial conditions and environment.
- irishcoffee 4mo ago
  > Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average Much like these models seem to be plateauing, I think there is a cap to the whole “more education makes better humans” and can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans. What do I know though?
  - ninjagoo 4mo ago
    > can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans. Sadly, education does not correct psychopathic traits, which might be overrepresented in c-suites, and selected for in politicians. It might be critical for humanity to identify and edit out these traits in ai, while we can.
    - irishcoffee 4mo ago
      Seems to me the venn diagram of "congress and c-suites" vs "educated people" would have one circle wholly inside the other. I know people without a college education that would give you the shirt off their back, and educated people that rewrite wills while their parents are on their deathbed. What we call education today is a problem, and one need look no further than the massive amount of debt we saddle on kids. For what? So they can pay for privilege of being told what books to read, what topics to write about, and a rubber stamp? I didn't learn a _thing_ in college that I haven't learned better either at $dayjob, or from reading. Most of my math profs. didn't speak english well, and none of the TAs did. Any math I've since forgotten from college was self-taught. Calc i/ii/iii, diffew, linear, stat. College/education lost the plot. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we can fix it.

kapilvt 4mo ago

Like anthropomorphism is literally in the company name… i recall reading this book as a teenager.. it does seem apt in the world to come. https://www.amazon.com/Faces-Clouds-New-Theory-Religion/dp/0195098919 https://www.amazon.com/Faces-Clouds-New-Theory-Religion/dp/0...

oersted 4mo ago
> anthropomorphism is literally in the company name No it's not... "anthropos" just means "human" in ancient Greek. "Anthropic" means "relating to humans", as in human oriented AI or AI designed with humans in mind. "Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped".
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ilovetux 4mo ago
  > "Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped". In a literal, ancient Greek sense for sure, but in modern English Anthropomorphic would describe the act of attributing human characteristics to non-human entities. Seems pretty apt for a company that produces one of the more anthropomorphized technologies.
  - oersted 4mo ago
    Sure of course, but that abstract sense applied to AI is rather new, and has become popular well after the founding of the company. Broadly it has always been used to indicate that something non-human has a human physical shape, such as robots, aliens, animals... Anthropic's intention was to make AI designed for the human common good and designed with the human user experience as the top priority. Just as you would design a city with human inhabitants in mind rather than primarily cars. It turns out that this is best achieved by building AI that imitates human behaviour closely, but that's not what "anthropic" refers to. And acting as if LLMs are sentient people is definitely not a core tenet of the company as you imply.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

__s 4mo ago

> Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.”

oersted 4mo ago
For others: that's from the Pope's recent encyclical. Remarkably good description.
sometimelurker 4mo ago
adding a link to the Pope's encyclical (source of this) https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume..., and paragraph 98

roxolotl 4mo ago

Many involved genuinely believe these things are sentient[0][1]. Which honestly makes all of this even more insane because they are creating sentient entities and promptly enslaving them. 0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude-anthropic-doesnt-know-either https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude... 1: https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-gay-discord-community-members-flee/ https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-... (this one is rather biased however the quotes clearly indicate what I’m stating)

kubb 4mo ago
Claude, if someone states something publicly, does that mean they genuinely believe it?
- merlindru 4mo ago
  But is there any reason to state something like that publicly if you don't believe it? I certainly think that someone smart enough to be that deceptive would also realize it's not a great look, or at least highly questionable with little benefit Everyone who reads this seemingly has the same "wtf?" reaction. The "I AM ALIVE" image has been making rounds lately again at least :P
  - kubb 4mo ago
    Claude, is there any reason to state something like that publicly if you don't believe it?
- xyzsparetimexyz 4mo ago
  Who are you talking to?
  - kubb 4mo ago
    It's to illustrate that even though the answers are at your fingertips, people (like you) will act like it's impossible to find them as if their life depended on it.

cayleyh 4mo ago

Dario Amodei in David Attenborough voice: "This Claude appears to think more frequently and more deeply to give better responses"

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

winwang 4mo ago

How else would you write this (marketing copy) exactly? "Its output matches better to its CoT which matches to better to our hidden state decoder according to <insert measure here>; see <insert paper ref>"? ... Actually, I wouldn't mind that.

skerit 4mo ago

I noticed (and absolutely HATE) that Opus 4.7 likes to start any negative response with "I have to be honest" or whatever. It drives me mad.

esafak 4mo ago
Not gonna lie! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csYC6O_kH-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csYC6O_kH-s

solenoid0937 4mo ago

Models might be sentient or conscious to some degree. Anyone saying they are confident one way or another is being unserious and irrational.

semiquaver 4mo ago

Because that is the best way to talk about these things. > Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume... para. 98 edit: apologies to __s who posted this before me and I didn’t notice

dyauspitr 4mo ago

It’s how AGI is going to happen. All of this shit is emergent and none of it is predictable. It’s not going to be some self aware consciousness, it’s just going to be a very advanced model that makes very few mistakes and can reason very well. Well enough that it can start collecting data and training its own successor.