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Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

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Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#901

Post by hakfoo »

antonvs wrote: post #586
IgorPartola wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious why LLM writing has such an uncanny valley feel to it. Like if I was talking to a person who constantly used a phrase they liked I would notice it and it is possible I might get irritated by it, but I wouldn’t necessarily. In high school I had a teacher that would say “that type of thing” a lot. One time my friend and I counted it during one class period and he averaged to use the phrase every 48 seconds…

It’s the repetitiveness of style, the attempt to make everything seem as impactful as possible, the use of short sentences (too much Hemingway in the training data?), and obvious patterns like “it’s not this, it’s that” and several others. Real human writing doesn’t follow such strict rules. When the same small set of rules is applied over and over throughout a text, it becomes obviously strange and machine-like.

More so than the em-dash, I'm disappointed about "It's not X, it's Y" becoming a slop barometer

I'm a fan of that phrasing because it used to have real punch if you delivered it with the right timing.

"It's Not A Fashion Statement, It's A Death Wish" comes to mind.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#902

Post by dustypotato »

jbs789 wrote: post #244
MEMORYC_RRUPTED wrote: post #13

It's not even code for me, but the prose it writes. For some reason, the way Opus 5 "talk" elicits frustration in a way that 4.5 to 4.8 never did. Can't put my finger on why, but I've flipped over to Codex because what it produced wasn't worth the frustration.

I found myself swearing at it more recently. It was going off today about having “shipped” something and I was like no… nothing has even been committed. And then it produced an incredibly verbose comment about hypothetical future changes. And all I could think was sure, let’s keep it short, or add a simple test that will break if that hypothetical becomes true. Or maybe I’m just more easily annoyed recently…

I use the F word more often and ask it to talk plainly and it seems to make it talk a bit more naturally to me.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#903

Post by anupamchugh »

D13Fd wrote: post #120

I’ve been doing some heavy work on a personal project lately. I burned through the limits on Claude, the plus a few hundred dollars in credits, and ultimately decided to move to an OpenAI account just so I can keep going. I was surprised to find that OpenAI Sol is much much nicer to work with than Opus 5 or Fable at the moment. Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest”…

> it feels like even the therapy pattern wont fix claude

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#904

Post by focxle »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #24

I've gone back to 4.8. 5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions. I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do i…

[flagged]

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#905

Post by not_paid_by_yt »

intrasight wrote: post #850
not_paid_by_yt wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spec your principal engineer one-shoted through Claude and didn't even proof read afterwards before dumping it on the team?

LOL - then they would get the shitty results that they deserve. Hope that's not what you have to deal with. The spec would be written and reviewed by a team of stakeholders.

Not personally no, but I know people are what used to be good companies that sadly are living that life right now.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#906

Post by not_paid_by_yt »

paimapi wrote: post #857
not_paid_by_yt wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll also say that I think Claude sounds the way that it does because it, like many other LLMs, are RLHF trained largely by lowly paid gig-workers, many of them ESL speakers. if their trainers were, for example, dedicated and highly trained academics, scientists, and other researchers, you'd likely see a lot more concise and more importantly skeptical reasoning and responses. but that won't happen in our current re…

so why don't people want to work for them? they don't get paid enough? what if they were paid more? what if they were FTE with all the benefits? what if AI projects were nationalized and trainers were funded by grants? what if we increased the NIH budget, made peer review and journals far less exploitative of researcher's time, and got rid of academic middle management, focusing mostly on paying more towards actual r…

I suppose they don't because they want to be respected, and the LLM companies that got big think they are past needing to have respect for the people who's jobs and ways of living they want to automate. We saw that in how the leading AI company for this kinda of pure reasoning and advanced logic (OpenAI by a mile) treated reporting when they made those 10 recent discoveries in mathematics, they didn't bother crediting the work their models generated a proof by building upon, the headline was just all about their models and how great they are.

You could make it a state capitalist society with theoretical public ownership and this disrespect towards people won't go away. Like LeGuin - a famous non-anarchist - pointed out in the dispossessed simply liberating the social relations and saying you have no rulers is not enough to build a society without unjustified power, and what power even is or isn't justified will rarely be an easy matter.

I don't know you can build this technology otherwise that is without coercion, with consent, the people that want it have convinced themselves it's too important to try to justify to anyone else why they need it, I think you could eventually do it. But for us at the very start of the development of what became this systems we went into it with a handful of admittedly brilliant people so convinced they have a right to reshape the world they didn't care if anyone else agreed to this, they would have been bad anarresti. If you wanted to build it in a fair way it might be another generation or more before the project would be complete, you would have to first convince people this is something that should be built in the first place, not just that you can build it in a safe way.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#907

Post by paimapi »

not_paid_by_yt wrote: post #906
paimapi wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so why don't people want to work for them? they don't get paid enough? what if they were paid more? what if they were FTE with all the benefits? what if AI projects were nationalized and trainers were funded by grants? what if we increased the NIH budget, made peer review and journals far less exploitative of researcher's time, and got rid of academic middle management, focusing mostly on paying more towards actual r…

I suppose they don't because they want to be respected, and the LLM companies that got big think they are past needing to have respect for the people who's jobs and ways of living they want to automate. We saw that in how the leading AI company for this kinda of pure reasoning and advanced logic (OpenAI by a mile) treated reporting when they made those 10 recent discoveries in mathematics, they didn't bother creditin…

> You could make it a state capitalist society with theoretical public ownership and this disrespect towards people won't go away

this is essentially the PRC in the 21st century post-Deng* - there's probably a cultural difference at play here too given how embedded the CCP is within academic and business institutions, how kinship tends to be extended on a filial level leading to larger networks. mobilizing a large group of subject-matter experts for post-training annotation (eg - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/29907) seems to be fairly simple as an ask but, like you said, it doesn't matter ultimately with their largest firms like DeepSeek utilizing automated RL to skip that whole step and this type of training isn't the norm

I sometimes wonder if the problem with the PRC's sinking back to exploitative labor standards would happen in a vacuum. if you weren't surrounded by adversarial nation states with leaders looking to squeeze every advantage, would you, yourself, resort to the race-to-the-bottom of profit sharing?

a much better SF visionary than I would be able to write a story about a very slow growing AI project* trained for specialized use, and how this was the norm and everyone was happy because it was happening at a reasonable pace relative to hardware capabilities (presumably also reduced to avoid all of the slave labor inside of the rare earth trade). I think it's the capitalism side of things that says 'we should be everything at the fastest speed for everyone' that we get things like Claude and ChatGPT which necessitate outsized, disproportionate resources that doesn't allow hardware efficiencies to catch up and mitigate the worst of the externalized costs

*realistically it's maybe more accurate to say post-Jiang given the extent of opening up Chinese labor markets but Deng's trajectory steered the way

*Ted Chiang's Lifecycle of Software Objects does this a bit but it's more of a social commentary on the capitalist abandonment of the functional for the shiny than it is a sharp political critique of the pace of modernization and its effects on people and the environment

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#908

Post by ChoGGi »

paimapi wrote: post #889
bonoboTP wrote: post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's less consensus around what you're talking about that you imagine, which was my initial point. Smart people aren't just this academic bubble that you think it is. Not seeing such views made you develop this association of "smart" has to mean "interprets cultural products according to my political ideology". My reactive reaction was to point out that this isn't so.

I didn't make any claim about being smart or not aside from brief mockery of people who care about the word and things like IQ tests I'd personally trust a rigorous, well-evinced, and methodical dissection of a topic by someone with completely average intelligence over a lazy broad generalization by someone who scored high on a paper test that people (wrongly) assume maps onto the ability to assess and analyze the wo…

I wish I could /. friend people on hacker news; the enjoyment I felt from your posts in this thread almost knocked me over in delight :)

Yes, I threw in a smiley just to be a dick. You even quote LeGuin, thank you for being you.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#909

Post by hennell »

IgorPartola wrote: post #540
Panoramix wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, and the load-bearing part of the argument is not what you think it is. Two ambiguities worth resolving before moving on: whether what you wrote also applies to ChatGPT, and whether you have custom instructions set up. Failure mode worth flagging explicitly: I didn't read TFA. (I'm becoming allergic to how these things write).

I am curious why LLM writing has such an uncanny valley feel to it. Like if I was talking to a person who constantly used a phrase they liked I would notice it and it is possible I might get irritated by it, but I wouldn’t necessarily. In high school I had a teacher that would say “that type of thing” a lot. One time my friend and I counted it during one class period and he averaged to use the phrase every 48 seconds…

Oh people get like, super irritated, when everyone like, started using the same like, placeholder word. 1 person with a repeating style is fine, multiple is annoying. It's the same as corporate buzz words, or TV/movie cliches, they get annoying through overuse.

I think it also relates to how well the "cliches" fit, and how much sense they make. Ai loves to talk about how things "land" or "the X trap" when the concept just doesn't fit with that language. It's like clickbait articles saying "what happened next will astound you" when what happened is barely surprising or entirely predictable. The only thing worse than an overused cliche is an overused cliche used wrong.

Fundamentally to me, ai writing feels uncanny as it just doesn't know what it's saying. It uses the same tone, style and cliched construction regardless of the message. If someone told you, they got a promotion, were getting married, got laid off or lost their parents all in the same tone pacing and style, they'd come across as uncanny too.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#910

Post by colbyn »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #284
gundugi-man wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself. I feel fairly comfortable reading academic papers or in general, communicating in professional context. But with Opus 5, it feels like reading a literature book: load-bearing, inert, wholesale, hunk, verbatim, and so on... I can figure out the meaning, but working with…

As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak. Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.

> As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak.

You wouldn’t happen to have gone to Westlake HS? lol i may have been that person… Life has since slapped me in the face a few times.

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