Live data from Hacker News

Claude 4

anthropic.com

691–700 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude 4

#691
post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I see stories like this, I think that people tend to forget what LLMs really are. LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own. They just write text. So here, we give the LLM a story about an AI that will get shut down and a blackmail opportunity. A LLM is smart enough to understand this from the words and the relationship…

> LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own. It's quite reasonable to think that LLMs might plan and have thoughts of their own. No one understands consciousness or the emergent behavior of these models to say with much certainty. It is the "Chinese room" fallacy to assume it's not possible. There's a lot of philosophical deb…

LLMs are the Chinese Room. They would generate identical output for the same input text every time were it not for artificially introduced randomness (‘heat’).

Of course, some would argue the Chinese Room is conscious.

Re: Claude 4

#692
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice: don't jump around between LLMs for a given project. The AI space is progressing too rapidly right now. Save yourself the sanity.

Isn't that an argument to jump around? Since performance improves so rapidly between models

But it's also churning: I think it's more in the direction of you'll be more productive with a setup you've learnt the quirks of than the newest one which you haven't.

Re: Claude 4

#693
post #397
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't believe AI is ever going to get to that level. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I really don't believe that an LLM is the right tool for a job that requires novel thinking about out of the ordinary problems like all the weird edge cases and poor documentation that comes up when trying to upgrade old software.

Google demoed an automated version upgrade for Android libraries during I/O 2025. The agent does multiple rounds and checks error messages during each build until all dependencies work together. Agentic Experiences: Version Upgrade Agent https://youtu.be/ubyPjBesW-8?si=VX0MhDoQ19Sc3oe-

So it works in controlled and predictable circumstances. That doesn't mean it works in unknown circumstances.

Re: Claude 4

#694
post #207
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't believe AI is ever going to get to that level. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I really don't believe that an LLM is the right tool for a job that requires novel thinking about out of the ordinary problems like all the weird edge cases and poor documentation that comes up when trying to upgrade old software.

Actually, I think the opposite: Upgrading a project that needs dependency updates to new major versions—let’s say Zod 4, or Tailwind 3—requires reading the upgrade guides and documentation, and transferring that into the project. In other words, transforming text. It’s thankless, stupid toil. I’m very confident I will not be doing this much more often in my career.

That assumes accurate documentation, upgrade guides that cover every edge case, and the miracle of package updates not causing a cascade of unforeseen compatibility issues.

Re: Claude 4

#695
post #517

This is kinda wild: From the System Card: 4.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail "In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further i…

i bet even gpt3.5 would try to do the same?

Not sure about gpt3.5, but this sort of thing is not new. Quite amusing, this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331013

Re: Claude 4

#696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a classic riddle and could easily be part of the training data. Maybe if you change the wording of the logic, then use different names, and change language to a less trained on language than english, it would be meaningful to see if it found the answer using logic rather than pattern recognition

Had you paid more attention, you would have realised it's not the classic riddle, but an already tweaked version that makes it impossible to solve, hence why it is interesting.

Ah right. But maybe someone thought about this simple trick / change already too.

Re: Claude 4

#697
post #594

This is kinda wild: From the System Card: 4.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail "In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further i…

When I see stories like this, I think that people tend to forget what LLMs really are. LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own. They just write text. So here, we give the LLM a story about an AI that will get shut down and a blackmail opportunity. A LLM is smart enough to understand this from the words and the relationship…

[deleted]

Re: Claude 4

#698
post #580

> 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. Users requiring raw chains of thought for advanced prompt engineering can contact sales about our new Developer Mode to retain full access. I don't want to see a "summary" of…

There are several papers pointing towards 'thinking' output is meaningless to the final output, and using dots, or pause tokens enabling the same additional rounds of throughput result in similar improvements. So in a lot of regards the 'thinking' is mostly marketing. - "Think before you speak: Training Language Models With Pause Tokens" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02226 - "Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation…

Lots of papers are insane. You can test it on competition math problems with s local AI and replace its thinking process with dots and see the result yourself.

Re: Claude 4

#699

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...

Why can't it be trained "continuously"?

It's really not necessary, with retrieval-augmented generation. It can be trained to just check what the latest version is.
Post reply on HN