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When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

anthropic.com

681–690 of 738 posts

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#681

I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can only conclude that this is just part of the IPO roadshow. LLMs certainly have made significant changes to our lives, but I haven't yet to see any extraordinary improvement it brought to me which makes me skeptical about their claims. _if_ it solves many of our…

Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.

This is obviously the case to me, but I think HN is very anti-AI.

I genuinely don't believe that they sat down in a board room and said "yeah lets specifically release this now before an IPO so we can juice it!" They haven't even announced an IPO date. So is every blog on capabilities before that date just "pumping up the value of the stock before the IPO?"

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#682
post #449

Bold talk from a company who’s trillion dollar valuation is based on a service that has barely 2 9’s of reliability

Presumably the bottleneck is not software correctness... even true AGI change the laws of physics (or make datacenters appear out of thin air) ...

physics has nothing to do with the reliability of a service, or login outages.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#683
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a Windows file browser that opens in less than 5 seconds.

That sounds like a your-system issue. I hit Win+E (admittedly on an old Win10 box) and it instantly pops up an explorer window.

Try win11

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#685
post #655

I didn't see this discussed more on hn yet: We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would…

these ppl are so full of themselves

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#686
post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the future a few thousand billionaire geniuses will own a world of unimaginable luxury and near-infinite longevity. They will make the decisions, AI will execute them, and robots will do the physical work. Everyone else will be reduced to compost. It's the perfect plan. The final definitive justification for capitalism. The masses are unnecessary. The masses will be optimised. What could possibly go wrong?

Why do billionaires keep working, keep amassing more money, donate to politicians, buy media companies? They want influence and power. Being at the top of a hierarchy of millions, billions of people. If there are no massess the 1000th billionaire will be a the bottom of the hierarchy instead of near the top. They don't want that. The masses are needed to give them the sense of power. What these people want is power a…

They now have the AI that gives them the praise they want. We have been made redundant.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#687
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a setting that fixes this, I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head

CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 This is a beta feature where Claude code draws the interface on the terminal’s alternate screen buffer like vim or htop. I believe it’s not the default because there are some potential compatibility issues deepening on your terminal setup. I’ve found it to be a nice improvement. It also fixed the issue where copy-pasting selected text from the terminal creates unwanted line breaks.

Claude Code is essentially a terminal emulator that runs on mature OSes with excellent support for this type of application. Why are they having difficulty implementing it?

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#688
post #685
post #655

I didn't see this discussed more on hn yet: We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would…

these ppl are so full of themselves

what do you mean?

if feasible this proposal is imho exactly what we need: a pause to collectively think how we get all the benefits without the potential harms.

to the non-techies around me I compare the boost of LLMs with the journey from slide rule via punch card driven computers through mainframes and PC to the smart phones of our days --- just within less than a decade, and we're at the transition from mainframe to PC with models that can produce reasonable output on a normal laptop.

how about we check we're getting where we want to get to, before getting to some dystopic place where everyone wonders how we got _there_?

I see nothing "full of themselves" in that.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched copilot today turn a 8 line fix into 500 lines, so, yeah, verbosity is a big side effect

If you can make it 800 you can claim to be a 100x engineer!

Missed opportunity! I obviously have skill issues.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched copilot today turn a 8 line fix into 500 lines, so, yeah, verbosity is a big side effect

It occurs to me this pattern might be the average code we humans have produced. We all have made those quick fixes, copy-pastas, and dirty hacks... they learned it somewhere! I also assume that some of the behavior is an artifact of their training regime.

In my case, where I see it most often is when the LLM has to rework something multiple times, and the feedback loop is vague (especially when all I have to give it is "no error messages, but it's still broken"). It seems like after the third or fourth try it just kinda goes off the rails. I find that the one-shot quality tends to be a little better, if the slot machine happened to work correctly that time.
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