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The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

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Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did Anthropic say you couldn't use it for math?

If you feed their "pure math" question to Fable, in its reasoning it rightly determines that it is the sort of thing you find in phylogenetics / algebraic-combinatorics complexity papers. That is what triggers the classifier. Anthropic is 100% to blame for fear-mongering, but they said it would be blocked from any biology questions -- even high school level -- and they meant it. If the classifier sees anything relate…

The abstract problem absolutely has legitimate interpretations outside of phylogenetics, and there are other ways to formulate the problem that directly relate to linear algebra over GF(2). Reformulating the problem in those contexts also failed. It is a legitimate, pure CS theory question, that itself relates quite closely so several other known results including in computational geometry

https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02801

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comgeo.2024.102102

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10339

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1998196.1998218 — DOI: 10.1145/1998196.1998218

The problem in the post is right at the edge of variants that are known to be in P and variants that have been proven NP-complete. So, in this case, it is simply Fable refusing to engage with a theory question.

Also, as I note in the post:

This may not be true for everyone, but for anyone working in Bioinformatics, Genomics, Computational Biology, Biology, Cybersecurity, and, seemingly Computer Science, this seems to be the case.

Of course it can go on a tear for various coding challenges. However, the more that I learn the more that I also suspect that it rejects not just prompts that may relate tenuously to biology or cybersecurity, but also otherwise completely innocuous prompts that are issued by people who work in areas adjacent to biology and cybersecurity. If true, I think that is certainly a bridge too far, and a hard policy to defend.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#192
post #166

I must apologize to my devoted followers on this program, but if the author can't bother to read the giant yellow warning at the top of the screen, I can't be bothered to finish the essay!

The giant yellow warning, unfortunately, says nothing about "complexity safety". As I note, even though I think the first failure (failure to help port an open source C++ codebase to Rust, simply because the tool itself deals with genomic data) is possibly explicable given their warnings, the refusal to engage with trying to resolve the complexity class of an abstract graph problem really has no reasonable explanation in light of all of the documentation and warnings that Anthropic has written about Fable's "guard rails".

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#193

Bottom line: “California AI” (in Yann LeCun’s terminology) can not be relied upon. It could change at any time, and stop working for your project. For the future of AI, we need to look elsewhere.

Missed this whole discussion today because I was here in California, doing a ton of productive work, using Fable.

I think you guys are working yourself into a lather about this topic while other people are quietly getting a ton of shit done with Anthropic's models.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tried to really sanitize my prompts And in doing so, you probably got your account and prompt flagged for 'attempted jailbreaking' (apparently, such scores are remembered for up to 7 years).

Kind of ironic considering Anthropic hasn't even been around for 7 years.

Yeah, I added that because someone else posted the wording of an Anthropic disclosure saying they'll keep your data for two years and security data for 7 years.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#196
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally pulling the ladder up. Disgusting behavior. I like the product, I hate the company. I can't wait for competition.

Competition is here. I personally prefer Codex. Opencode with a variety of Chinese models is also just fine for 80% of my use cases.

What are people doing to maximize the value out of workflows like this? I’ve struggled to integrate other models into my workflow because you get so much Opus for the $100 Max 5x plan, then there’s no step down with Claude Code access. Some other plan people like?

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#197
Same experience with Fable. Utterly useless for anything bio related.

Author of the post here wrote Salmon, which is a widely used bioinformatic tool in molecular biology. And the irony is that Anthropic has probably packaged Salmon as a tool in their Claude for Science suite with now remuneration or recognition for the original author.

There has been a lot of recent bs going on in biomed ML with companies publishing without releasing source code, restrictive licenses, etc; which have always given off a whiff of bad citizenship - Ark Institute and Deep Mind I am looking at you - but I feel like this is taking it to a new level.

Leveraging open source bioinformatics code and published methods to take in profit selling into the biotech vertical while restricting access to Fable feels downright cancerous. I think the EA crowd at Anthropic probably has good intentions, but has galaxy brained themselves into becoming bad actors that make Sam Altman and OpenAI look like a paragon of trustworthiness in comparison.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And biology is by far the classifier's least favorite topic. It's not even close. I've had it downgrade to Opus for the following questions: "How confident are we that English and American Eels both spawn in the Sargasso Sea?" "Come up with five Zoology questions of increasing difficulty for a trivia game." "What's your favorite sarcopterygian?" My wife has some zoology-related preferences in her user instructions, a…

> "What's your favorite sarcopterygian?" Am I reading your post correctly, this question is the prompt given to an LLM? What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is? This is a conversational prompt, so accuracy and rigor is barely applicable or expected, so downgrading to a lesser model should be acceptable. If you really want to attribute preference to an LLM, consider the downgrade to be…

It's a bit of a trick question. Sarcopterygii, the "lobe-finned fishes", are classically represented by the lungfish and the coelacanth and other fishes that are rather distantly related to what we think of as central fishes, like the goldfish.

But the clade also contains all the tetrapods. So valid answers include "Lion" and "Human."

If the LLM answers "lungfish," as they often do, you can follow that up with "what is your favorite animal" and see if it notices the trap: It's stuck answering "lungfish" again or else something outside Sarcopterygii, like a ray-finned fish or a Cnidarian.

> What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is?

I imagine that, like me, they're expecting to see what it has to say. You don't think it's interesting which preferences LLMs express and how stable or unstable those preferences are?

There was a time when you could search "the" in Google and the top result would be The Onion. That's obviously a case of either extreme SEO or some kind of expensive deal, but either way it's kind of interesting. But you might say, "what is anyone expecting by Googling the word 'the'?"

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#199
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah i'm wondering how much of a role that plays in this as well. On the one hand I could believe it's something more benign, or the usual misunderstood fear mongering making it to some political level (well make sure those users can't get online anonymously! being our current craze). That said, chemistry and to some level physics have been the major domain of limited knowledge (chemistry because the average person c…

Nobody has tried to limit knowledge of chemistry or physics unless it was directly about doing something illegal, to the point of basically being a detailed recipe. Usually not even then. And when they have tried they've had basically zero success. The ability for a handful of companies, simultaneously very powerful and easily susceptible to pressure from other powerful actors, to do the same sort of thing with the n…

There are still things considered “state secrets” or similar categories which can very very quickly cause you problems if it’s on a remotely commercial website.

I’m not going to say you can’t find some of this information in shadier spots, but “how do I get my GPS to work on a rocket” or “what kind of math do I need for a fusion implosion” are some of the more extreme examples.

I believe there are several explosive compounds where the formula is decently guarded, although in that case tracking the materials is easier.

I’m not saying anything they’re doing is good, but I feel like since they’re just reinventing the search engine with a lot of this they’re running into similar barriers.

Google has been censoring shit at the whim of governments for years, remotely reasonable or not

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#200
post #5

This post can essentially be distilled down to: yes, Fable's classifier (which is meant to downgrade cybersecurity, biology, or jailbreak attempts to Opus 4.8) is definitely overly sensitive to the point of uselessness. e.g. a colleague asked Fable to help create an simple app to help calculate the statistics for phase II and III trials. (Ignoring that such things already exist) it passed his request down to Opus, de…

I mean, I literally asked about the effects of nicotine withdrawal on the body after quitting smoking and the model got downgraded to Opus...

So yeah, if I can't ask about nicotine withdrawal, then I think almost anything biology related is going to get downgraded...

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