Live data from Hacker News

Claude 4

anthropic.com

221–230 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude 4

#221

An important note not mentioned in this announcement is that Claude 4's training cutoff date is March 2025, which is the latest of any recent model. (Gemini 2.5 has a cutoff of January 2025) https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/about-claude/models/overv...

Although I believe it, I wish there was some observability into what data is included here.

Both Sonnet and Opus 4 say Joe Biden is president and claim their knowledge cutoff is "April 2024".

Re: Claude 4

#222

Claude 3.8 wrote me some code this morning, and I was running into a bug. I switched to 4 and gave it its own code. It pointed out the bug right away and fixed it. So an upgrade for me :-)

Did you try 3.7 for debugging first? Just telling it there's a bug can be enough.

That probably would have worked. I just discovered there was a bug, and it popped up a thing about 4, so I didn't actually try the old version.

Re: Claude 4

#223
On non-coding or mathematical tasks I'm not seeing a difference yet.

I wish someone focused on making the models give better answers about the Beatles or Herodotus...

Re: Claude 4

#224

Is this really worthy of a claude 4 label? Was there a new pre-training run? Cause this feels like 3.8... only swe went up significantly, and that as we all understand by now is done by cramming on specific post training data and doesn't generalize to intelligence. The agentic tooluse didn't improve and this says to me that it's not really smarter.

They say in the blog post that tool use has improved dramatically: parallel tool use, ability to use tools during thinking and more.

Re: Claude 4

#225

Wonder why they renamed it from Claude (e.g. Claude 3.7 Sonnet) to Claude (Claude Opus 4).

I guess because they haven't been releasing all three models of the same version in a while now. We've only had Sonnet updates, so the version first didn't make sense if we had 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet but none of the others.

Re: Claude 4

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be able to ask it what it knows.

So something's odd there. I asked it "Who won Super Bowl LIX and what was the winning score?" which was in February and the model replied "I don't have information about Super Bowl LIX (59) because it hasn't been played yet. Super Bowl LIX is scheduled to take place in February 2025.".

With LLMs, if you repeat something often enough, it becomes true.

I imagine there's a lot more data pointing to the super bowl being upcoming, then the super bowl concluding with the score.

Gonna be scary when bot farms are paid to make massive amounts of politically motivated false content (specifically) targeting future LLMs training

Re: Claude 4

#227
post #98

> Finally, we've introduced thinking summaries for Claude 4 models that use a smaller model to condense lengthy thought processes. This summarization is only needed about 5% of the time—most thought processes are short enough to display in full. This is not better for the user. No users want this. If you're doing this to prevent competitors training on your thought traces then fine. But if you really believe this is…

I believe this is to improve performance by shortening the context window for long thinking processes. I don't think this is referring to real-time summarizing for the users' sake.

When you do a chat are reasoning traces for prior model outputs in the LLM context?

Re: Claude 4

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Plays Pokemon was the original concept and inspiration behind "Gemini Plays Pokemon". Gemini arguably only did better because it had access to a much better agent harness and was being actively developed during the run. See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7mqp8uRnnPdbBzJZE/is-gemini-...

Not sure "original concept" is quite right, given it had been tried earlier, e.g. here's a 2023 attempt to get gpt-4-vision to play pokemon, (it didn't really work, but it's clearly "the concept") https://x.com/sidradcliffe/status/1722355983643525427

I see, I wasn't aware of that. The earliest attempt I knew of was from May 2024,[1] while this gpt-4-vision attempt is from November 2023. I guess Claude Plays Pokemon was the first attempt that had any real success (won a badge), and got a lot of attention over its entertaining "chain-of-thought".

[1] https://community.aws/content/2gbBSofaMK7IDUev2wcUbqQXTK6/ca...

Re: Claude 4

#229
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I decided to try Claude 4 Sonnet against my "Given a list of 1 million random integers between 1 and 100,000, find the difference between the smallest and the largest numbers whose digits sum up to 30." benchmark I tested against Claude 3.5 Sonnet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42584400 The results are here ( https://gist.github.com/minimaxir/1bad26f0f000562b1418754d67... ) and it utterly crushed the proble…

> although it's possible Claude 4 was trained on that discussion lol Almost guaranteed, especially since HN tends to be popular in tech circles, and also trivial to scrape the entire thing in a couple of hours via the Algolia API. Recommendation for the future: keep your benchmarks/evaluations private, as otherwise they're basically useless as more models get published that are trained on your data. This is what I do…

>> although it's possible Claude 4 was trained on that discussion lol

> Almost guaranteed, especially since HN tends to be popular in tech circles, and also trivial to scrape the entire thing via the Algolia API.

I am wondering if this could be cleverly exploited.

Re: Claude 4

#230

Nice to see that Sonnet performs worse than o3 on AIME but better on SWE-Bench. Often, it's easy to optimize math capabilities with RL but much harder to crack software engineering. Good to see what Anthropic is focusing on.

That's a very contentious opinion you're stating there. I'd say LLMs have surpassed a larger percentage of SWEs in capability than they have for mathematicians.
Post reply on HN