| ▲ | Philpax 15 hours ago |
| > Jarred Sumner, an Anthropic staff member (and non-mathematician) prompted Claude to “take a real stab” at the hypothesis itself, leaving the mathematical choices from there up to the model. Initially, Claude generated and tried 650 ideas, none of which worked. 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 The subagents ran thousands of numerical checks against known zeta zeros and refereed one another’s work. Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress. The world we live in is beyond parody. |
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| ▲ | astro1234 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Im curious if you find this to be a parody in a bad way or simply a “the state of the art in math research right now is telling a machine to believe in itself”. I am in the latter camp… |
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| ▲ | EMIRELADERO 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model. Anthropic is especially guilty of this. They have been using such language for a while, like when they analyze model weights for mechanistic interpretability and call it the model's "biology". It's just distasteful. | | |
| ▲ | godwinson__4-8 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model. Not really. The input and output is already natural language. That is already "anthropomorphizing". That is, if this is the bar for anthropomorphization its already happened. Telling the model to "believe in itself" is just stochastic manipulation that has shown enough reliability to be a recipe to make it keep going. It's only actually anthropomorphizing if you forget it's a trick and think it's a real person. There is nothing distasteful about it. If people get confused that's on them. They wouldn't be very useful if you couldn't just talk to them. That's kind of the whole point. Otherwise you can just go back to coding by hand. Telling it to believe itself is just input that happens to work. This probably tells us more about human nature than you realize given the corpus on which it is trained. It obviously doesn't mean anyone actually thinks it's a person. | | |
| ▲ | moralestapia 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | >There is nothing distasteful about it. It's obvious that you don't get it but I will try my best to explain why so at least you can form an idea about how others feel. It's about what makes humans unique. The LLM does not experience reality, it just merely pretends it does, and even that, it does in a shitty way. I think disgusting is a very adequate adjective. The reason why it is disgusting is because you are devaluing a divine experience to the realm of the common and the vulgar, a cheap substitute being valued as equal (or even on the same scale) as the most important experience we could go through. To give you an example that might land in a more familiar context, think of that one guy who takes his plastic doll everywhere and pretends it's his wife and gets upset when others don't acknowledge "her" as a person. | | |
| ▲ | cat-snatcher 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The LLM does not experience reality Who said that it did? The comment you're replying to literally states "It's only actually anthropomorphizing if you forget it's a trick and think it's a real person". You're the one obviously not getting it. | |
| ▲ | godwinson__4-8 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > pretending it does is disgusting. There is no pretending happening. Telling it to believe in itself is no more pretending than telling it anything else in natural language. Why are you speaking to it at all if it's not a person? Why write in higher level languages even? It's just a machine let's all go back and code in 1s and 0s. No one is calling it a person except mental health patients and straw man detractors. The biology example was even weaker. Saying it has a "biology" is about as distasteful as the term "neural net" or calling an input device a "mouse". Is it animal abuse to click on something all day? Language is inherently anthropomorphizing. No one is calling it human. The fact you are so easily threatened is far more suggestive of your own poverty of understanding of not only the machine, but yourself. If humans are so special the threat posed by this should be self evidently non existent. | |
| ▲ | monkpit 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Who is pretending? | |
| ▲ | thunky 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're accusing GP of saying something they didn't say and simultaneously telling them they don't "get it". That's distasteful. |
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| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > because it's anthropomorphizing a model. Is it though? There's a perfectly "technical" reason why this strategy should work, without any sort of anthropomorphising: Assume models are trained on vast amounts of data. Assume that the model is asked to solve something that the literature says it's impossible. It will start generating tokens towards that "this is a famous conjecture, it's not possible to prove it, blah blah". Assume the model was also trained on books/novels/etc. Assume the model was also also trained on "solving" many math problems. Now, you can make an argument that just placing "you can do it" in the context will "steer" the model towards generating "moving forward" tokens. Take ideas, generate tokens, go towards negative. "You can do it". Model starts generating tokens again, more ideas, more "exploration". More negativity. "I believe in you keep going". The two (book tropes + math CoT) mix together in the context. The model keeps on "pushing" and "vibing" between the two. Ta dah, it works. | |
| ▲ | mannycalavera42 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model. The Yegge thinks differently https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/ | | |
| ▲ | jplusequalt 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | What is the point of this comment? Am I supposed to stop all critical thinking since someone else had a different opinion? |
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| ▲ | Philpax 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | For me, personally, it's that the Bun guy - specifically him, not a mathematician - indirectly progressed the Riemann hypothesis by repeatedly telling a model to ganbatte! It's a ridiculous position we find ourselves in. |
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| ▲ | geodel 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Jarred Sumner is the Bun (javascript build tool, packager) guy who recently converted Bun code from Zig to Rust via Claude of course! It lead to thousands of comments discussion here on HN just a few weeks back. It is great to see his claude skills are suitably put to use. |
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| ▲ | TacticalCoder 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | > ... who recently converted Bun code from Zig to Rust via Claude ... The project that is full of bugs and not really working? I probably missed something but I was under the impression that even a "simple" translation like that couldn't be properly done and that the result was, well, buggy? Where's that thing at? | | |
| ▲ | terhechte 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Its working fine; to the detriment of the whole club of stochastic parrot folk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49069787 | | |
| ▲ | aureate 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Most likely next Tuesday we’ll do the release of 1.4. Next Tuesday, otherwise known as last Tuesday. Still no 1.4 at https://bun.com/blog. I'm very curious to see what happens when 1.4 does get released for real. Releasing Claude Code on it is much easier as they own Claude Code and can get Claude to work on Bun with fixing some specific behaviour in Claude Code as an objective. Releasing it for the world, and doing it well enough that it doesn't result in everyone pinning on the old version and forks springing up, involves reproducing all the behaviours of the old
version, documented/tested and otherwise, that projects are relying on - which, by Hyrum's law, is all of them. | |
| ▲ | solid_fuel 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > to the detriment of the whole club of stochastic parrot folk What an interesting and pointless way to refer to “experts who understand what an LLM actually is” | | |
| ▲ | rcxdude an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The people who refer to LLMs as stochastic parrots generally do so to imply significant limits on an LLMs ability, not as an abstract statement about the underlying mechanism of how they work. Probably the defining thing that is surprising about LLMs is that they do in fact gain significantly more capability than you would expect from such a simple underlying mechanism! | |
| ▲ | nl 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The concept of "stochastic parrot" is that an LLM merely parrots its training data with some randomness. We now know that isn't true - LLMs build complex internal models and output based on that. See for example https://arxiv.org/html/2505.23323v1 Also, you are commenting on a post where a LLM made significant progress on the Riemann hypothesis. Even the most extreme interpretation of these results, ie claiming that it was "only linking existing literature" goes well beyond a "stochastic parrot" - it had to be able to link disparate insights across multiple fields. |
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| ▲ | whatever1 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I mean people beat diseases by encouragement and some sugar water (placebo) |
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| ▲ | johnnienaked 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's literally just brute forcing lol |
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| ▲ | mahogany 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Taking Anthropic’s whole AI framing to its obvious logical end: if this is true as written, why was Jarred needed at all in this loop? It seems like an utter waste of time for a highly paid Anthropic employee. Can’t Anthropic have a top level agent that is looking at all interesting unsolved problems and orchestrating subagents via the same process? |
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