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> Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yoursel
by simonw 2mo ago
> Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”). This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.
I remain delighted at how absurd our current timeline has become.
- siva7 2mo agoReality has become more absurd than the cyber punk cheese from the 80's that tried to imagine an absurd future
- turing_complete 2mo ago$2M TC. Job: AI cheerleader.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bijowo1676 2mo agoThe cheerleading part was a human consent to spend more tokens and explore the space I would love to see the breakdown on token spend between each or Jared’s “go on spend more tokens, continue experiment, believe in yourself”
- ramraj07 2mo agoHave you seen how much college football coaches make? The world collectively spends trillions training, and entertaining and then watching people kick and hit balls around but somehow working with AI is preposterous for less money.
- keybored 2mo agoAsking the AI to believe in itself is the absurd part. I don’t understand why people think describing something in some ostensibly dismissive way constitutes making a point. But some people spend their time banging keys with letters on them (or not with letters on them) into input fields and then pressing Return, so I guess some subset of those people will do that.
- mwigdahl 2mo agoI don’t think it’s absurd. We’ve created these things, however alien the structure, with as much human text as we can scrounge up and jam into them. Text is an imperfect distillation of the human experience, but it doesn’t surprise me that a machine trained on human text responds to human encouragement.
- ianbicking 2mo agoLooking at the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and the difference in what "persistent" models do, it seems reasonable. Like: is this a solvable problem? How much work does the model think is intended to solve this problem? Each input raises the expectation. And then finally both model output and human input become one world frame for the model, and the human adding a "you can do it!" isn't just input but a frame that colors not just the next step for the model, but also all previous steps (since at each step the model is viewing the totality of the transcript). That this makes sense only makes it all the more absurd
- bwfan123 2mo ago> Jarred prompted Claude to try again, and it spent a day and a half coordinating about 60 Claude subagents, which this time went much deeper: between them, they ran 2,400 shell commands and wrote hundreds of Python scripts.1 If there is anything to learn from the history of science, it is that breakthroughs happen via better or new theory and not by brute-force compute [1]. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27794 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27794
- simonw 2mo agoBrute-force compute hasn't been an option for most of the history of science.
- sosodev 2mo agoVery true. Humans have historically tried to systematically reduce the search space and only dedicate their "compute" to things that seem highly likely to yield results.
- mkl 2mo agoIt still isn't an option for most problems, either because it would take far more computing power than is available or because the number of things to compute is infinite. In both cases, new theory is what can succeed instead. Developing new theory by brute force can be attempted, but will almost always run into the same problems. Using AI to develop new theory is using heuristics rather than brute force.
- JuanFAngel 2mo agoBut it does raise the bar for what is brute-force solvable by a lot, which is very significant
- Tostino 2mo agoSometimes you just need to put in some effort to looking through the search space, not even exhaustively. This seems to be able to do automate doing that work.
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- lithobraking 2mo agoIn meme form: https://imgur.com/a/rlmZuU1 https://imgur.com/a/rlmZuU1 (I hope this is ok to post on HN!)
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- petesergeant 2mo agoAnother technique I've used is to tell agents something already exists. "Grok already solved this" seems to help, or claiming to have suddenly noticed a fatal flaw[0]. 0: https://sgnt.ai/p/terrible-mistake/ https://sgnt.ai/p/terrible-mistake/
- samrus 2mo agoBroke: the AI is sycophantic to me Woke: im sycophantic to the AI
- sscaryterry 2mo ago100%. I've disliked people because people lie, and loved computers because they didn't. Now they do too. :(
- aanet 2mo ago> I remain delighted at how absurd our current timeline has become. "delighted" is doing a LOT of work there, tbh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I do share @simonW's skepticism though. (His blog is my essential reading, FWIW) On the actual blog post, I'd would be more enthusiastic if Anthropic showed us if the results were repeatable, reproducible, and consistent.
- throw310822 2mo agoIndeed, that's a paragraph straight out of Lem's Cyberiad.
- delightgull 2mo ago[flagged]
- applicative 2mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic don't own any datacenters or order anyone to build them. It's easy to find out who does; you won't like the answer.
- laukhin 2mo agoit's pretty much a marketing attempt to humanize the LLM (it seems successful from the reaction I see)
- modeless 2mo agoI feel justified in not expending any effort learning "prompting technique".
- Oarch 2mo agoI believe in you
- patcon 2mo ago"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law "Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." -- Teller (of Penn & Teller) "Sometimes, any sufficiently advanced technology is just spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." -- an LLM's original thought, probably
- graceful6800 2mo agoThat's really what's going on here, I think. LLMs aren't that good at math or have deep mathematical insight. They just automate "try shit until something sticks" at scale, which, as it turns out, is a pretty decent way to turn out a bunch of math papers. LLMs have enabled brute forcing of math in a way that classical computing somehow has not, which is fascinating in and of itself.
- saidnooneever 2mo agowho knew u could do tons of computations and brute force maths with an insanely large gpu cluster eh :). weird stuff!
- yencabulator 2mo agoI call this Artificial Patience.
- fragmede 2mo agoI don't if it's better or worse than the time I had Claude say it couldn't do something so I prompted it "yes you can", and it obliged. Absurd either way!