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Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

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Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#161

[flagged]

"1) Python is unreadable."

Would you prefer C or C++?

"2) AI companies are content with slop and do not even bother with clear problem statements."

It's a filter. If you don't get the problem, you'll waste their time.

"3) LOC and appearance matter, not goals or correctness."

The task was goal+correctness.

"4) Anthropic must be a horrible place to work at."

Depends on what you do. For this position it's probably one of the best companies to work at.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#163
Are you allowed to change the instruction sequence? I see some optimization opportunities - it'd be obviously the correct thing to do an optimizing compiler, but considering the time allotted, Id guess you could hand-optimize it, but that feels like cheating.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#164
post #152
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now the meaning is different: you went from a potential interview to a guaranteed one.

No fucking shit, I paraphrased Anthropic's comments as > do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you If you think telling someone that after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.

That's not how paraphrasing works. They probably intentionally held back from guaranteeing an interview, for various reasons. One that seems obvious to me is that with the bar set at "Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch", it's plausible that someone could meet it by feeding the problem into an LLM. If a bunch of people do that, they won't want to waste time interviewing them all.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#166
post #152
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now the meaning is different: you went from a potential interview to a guaranteed one.

No fucking shit, I paraphrased Anthropic's comments as > do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you If you think telling someone that after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.

Or honest?

You may want to consider the distribution and quantity of replies before stating that you WILL do something that might just waste more people’s time or not be practical.

The classy thing to do would be responding to every qualifying submission, even if it’s just to thank everyone and let some people know the field was very competitive if an interview won’t be happening.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#167
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 30 years in, and literally don't understand the question.

The question isn't clearly written down anywhere, that's why. Presumably actual candidates would have been given more info over the phone or email. Part of the "challenge" is reverse engineering their Python; unclear if that's intentional. If you look at the top of perf_takehome.py then there is a brief comment saying the challenge is to optimize a kernel. Kernel in GPU land means a program that computes on data in p…

Wow! Thanks for the explanation :)

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#168

Naively tested a set of agents on this task. Each ran the same spec headlessly in their native harness (one shot). Results: Agent Cycles Time ───────────────────────────────────────────── gpt-5-2 2,124 16m claude-opus-4-5-20251101 4,973 1h 2m gpt-5-1-codex-max-xhigh 5,402 34m gpt-5-codex 5,486 7m gpt-5-1-codex 12,453 8m gpt-5-2-codex 12,905 6m gpt-5-1-codex-mini 17,480 7m claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929 21,054 10m claude-…

Could you try with some open-weighted models, e.g. Qwen3-coder, GLM-4.7 or Devstral-2?

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#169
post #152
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now the meaning is different: you went from a potential interview to a guaranteed one.

No fucking shit, I paraphrased Anthropic's comments as > do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you If you think telling someone that after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.

So I like these public challenges, but as someone who set some public questions, ask any company who ran any public contest for their opinion. The pool is filled with scammers who either bought the solutions through sites like Chegg or sometimes even just stackoverflow.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point still stands. I don't know what the LLM is doing so my guess is it's cheating unless there is evidence to the contrary.

Why do you assume it’s cheating?

Because it's a well know failure mode of neural networks & scalar valued optimization problems in general: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-020-00257-z
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