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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

#51

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

What is the point of this comment?

Am I supposed to stop all critical thinking since someone else had a different opinion?

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#52
post #43

> 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.

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

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#54

No more "stochastic parrots" and "LLM's can never produce anything novel, just regurgitate" comments anymore huh?

Sure, looks like 5% of math can be solved by 1T parameters stochastic parrot after NN trillion attempts (burned tokens). By numbers it could be less impressive than some brute force distributed chess engine.. Prove me wrong.

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#55
post #41
post #2

> 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, th…

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.

> ... 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?

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#56
post #43

> 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.

> 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

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#57
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…

>From these companies' standpoint, I think they would choose the latter.

Ever since these things came about I've wondered why they haven't been doing this the whole time. If they've got the "do-anything" robot and can scale a billion of them, why aren't they creating a Do-Everything conglomerate that disrupts every possible industry with zero/negligible labor costs?

The only answer I've come up with is that they still need to train/siphon off each industry's current expertise by having those users interact with the current models and adjusting. If that hypothesis is correct then within a few years they'll have no need for users anymore.

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#59
post #33

Several released versions and months ago, I asked Claude to figure out the MC (multiplicative complexity) of Conway's Game of Life and it pretty quickly arrived at k=7, despite no previous literature on the topic. Let it run it through SAT solvers for a week and sure enough. It claimed, in the process, to have made great headway in improving boolean circuits beyond the implemented SOTA (in large part no doubt by actu…

Sounds really cool, were you able to verify the correctness of the results?

Re: Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities

#60
post #2

> 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, th…

I mean people beat diseases by encouragement and some sugar water (placebo)

You shouldn't beat deceased!

P.S: I think you miswrote "diseases"

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