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simonw 14 hours 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.

patcon 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"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

lithobraking 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In meme form: https://imgur.com/a/rlmZuU1

(I hope this is ok to post on HN!)

turing_complete 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$2M TC. Job: AI cheerleader.

bijowo1676 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The 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 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have 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 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

Asking 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.

14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
bwfan123 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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

benswift 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nah, the main lesson is that fundamentally new ways of doing things are only accepted once the old guard are all dead [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

famouswaffles 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This isn't 'brute-force'. It's just time-compressed. You could imagine a human(s) getting this result similarly, but it would take months/years.

simonw 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Brute-force compute hasn't been an option for most of the history of science.

sosodev 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Very 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.

Tostino 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sometimes 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.

siva7 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reality has become more absurd than the cyber punk cheese from the 80's that tried to imagine an absurd future

modeless 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel justified in not expending any effort learning "prompting technique".

ianbicking 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Looking 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

simonw 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I buy the explanation that without encouragement Claude looked at everything in its existing training data and concluded it wasn't worth continuing to pursue the task.

jhrmnn 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The halting problem on steroids?

14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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samrus 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Broke: the AI is sycophantic to me

Woke: im sycophantic to the AI

laukhin 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's pretty much a marketing attempt to humanize the LLM (it seems successful from the reaction I see)

throw310822 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed, that's a paragraph straight out of Lem's Cyberiad.

petesergeant 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Another 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/

delightgull 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s so delightful how the economy is propped up by circular finance.

It’s so delightful that these genai corpos are undemocratically forcing data centers into our neighborhoods.

It’s so delightful that the data centers steal water, run up the price of electricity, and expel excessive greenhouse gases.

Only a deranged sociopath would find licking the shit stained taint of oligarchs delightful.

applicative 13 hours ago | parent [-]

OpenAI 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.

aanet 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.