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Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

anthropic.com

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Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#21

Post by moralestapia »

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #16
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

>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.

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#22

Post by mannycalavera42 »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #11
astro1234 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model.

The Yegge thinks differently https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#23

Post by qphe95 »

behnamoh wrote: post #9

Since they say that this is from an unreleased research version of Claude: I wonder if at some point Anthropic and OpenAI will start delaying the release of their models intentionally so they can reap the benefits from the models in, for example, mathematics, medicine, physics, and other fields. Just as an example, imagine if your model were capable of proving P = NP, or if your model could cure diseases. Would you r…

If a company had a model that could cure cancer they would be incentivized to release the cure ASAP before they get decapitation striked by regulators and other AI "safetyists".

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#24

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

moralestapia wrote: post #21
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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 deva…

> 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.

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#25

Post by [deleted] »

briansmith wrote: post #20
math_dandy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Levent Alpöge and Ralph Furman, two of Anthropic’s own mathematicians, examined Claude’s work to understand the new results and how they related to the prior work mentioned above.

Are they the authors of the “informal note” or not? I’ve never seen a math paper of any formality written without the authors’ names on it before.

[deleted]

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#26

Post by NitpickLawyer »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #11
astro1234 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#27

Post by QuesnayJr »

kingstnap wrote: post #12

Lets play over/under on an AI model proving (or counter exampling) the Riemann hypothesis? I'm not sure what a good mark would be, but considering this result lets put it at 2027-08-10 (One year from today).

As it stands now, the frontier models can prove theorems where the techniques exist in the literature, which it knows better than anyone who's ever lived and won't quit where a human would. There's no way to know if that's true of the Riemann Hypothesis until it's proven.

For example, even if Claude could prove the statement "100% of the zeroes lie on the critical line", that's strictly weaker than the Riemann Hypothesis, so even the best possible version of this result would fall short. (It's an asymptotic result, so it just means the percentage of counterexamples to the Riemann hypothesis goes to zero as their magnitude gets large.)

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#28

Post by thunky »

moralestapia wrote: post #21
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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 deva…

You're accusing GP of saying something they didn't say and simultaneously telling them they don't "get it".

That's distasteful.

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#29

Post by porridgeraisin »

When the time comes where one of these model makes an improvement in my niche, I hope to see some pattern in the type of discoveries. Yes, they are all roughly "combine two things no one thought of combining" but I mean at a more granular deeper level.

I want to dive into the "data" and then see if it's possible to distill this skill into small models that are "benchmaxxed" for this type of work, maybe in limited domains, similar to small models being benchmaxxed(I don't mean this in a bad way) for coding these days.

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#30

Post by cat-snatcher »

moralestapia wrote: post #21
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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 deva…

> 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.

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