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Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

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Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#241

Post by therealcamino »

observationist wrote: post #144
nonfamous wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing hyphen-hyphen-space is hardly exotic — I've been doing that since well beyond the advent of generative AI.

Right, just saying things like that -- aren't immediately apparent unless they're pointed out to you. The extended palette of alt+123 keycodes, unicode characters, stuff like that requires "exotic" macros or keypresses to type out. Despite decades of extensive experience with writing, writing software, programming, etc, I never crossed paths with em-dashes. They were a niche thing prior to AI making them a thing. I b…

They weren't exotic, they just weren't part of your writing style

The reason "--" autocorrects to an em dash in practically any word processing software (not talking about browsers) is that that's the accepted way to type it on a typewriter. And you don't need to go into any system settings to enable it. It came in around when things like Smart Quotes came in.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#243

Post by habinero »

astrange wrote: post #232
habinero wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if it was true, the system wouldn't be able to produce coherent sentences. Because that's actually the same problem as producing true sentences It is...not at all the same? Like they said, you can create perfectly coherent statements that are just wrong. Just look at Elon's ridiculously hamfisted attempts around editing Grok system prompts. Also, a lot of information on the web is just wrong or out of date, and cod…

I should've said they're equally hard problems and they're equally emergent. Why are you just taking it for granted it can write coherent text, which is a miracle, and not believing any other miracles?

Because it's not a miracle? I'm not being difficult here, it's just true. It's neat and fun to play with, and I use it, but in order to use anything well, you have to look critically at the results and not get blinded by the glitter.

Saying "Why can't you be amazed that a horse can do math?" [0] means you'll miss a lot of interesting phenomena.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#244

Post by kridsdale3 »

burkaman wrote: post #116
isoprophlex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fantastic 2010 Ted Chiang story exploring just that, in which the most universally useful, stable and emotionally palatable AI constructs are those that were actually raised by human trainers living with them for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...

It might be just me but I found this story incredibly boring and difficult to get through, so much so that I haven't gone back to finish the rest of Exhalation yet. The ideas are very interesting, like all his stories, but the plot and characters feel like bare-bones scaffolding, just there so we can call it a story instead of an essay. I think it could have worked as a short story, but as an almost full-length novel…

I've read all of Ted's work and I hope you do try going back to Exhalation and just skipping TLOSO to get to more good stuff. It is far too long and I thought there was some value in it, but it was a slog, and in the bottom 1/4 of the stories IMO, so just skip it and get more great value.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#245

Post by astrange »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #240
astrange wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should've said they're equally hard problems and they're equally emergent. Why are you just taking it for granted it can write coherent text, which is a miracle, and not believing any other miracles?

"Paris is the capital of France" is a coherent sentence, just like "Paris dates back to Gaelic settlements in 1200 BC", or "France had a population of about 97,24 million in 2024". The coherence of sentences generated by LLMs is "emergent" from the unbelievable amount of data and training, just like the correct factoids ("Paris is the capital of France"). It shows that Artificial Neural Networks using this architectu…

> But applying logic or being able to observe the physical world doesn't emerge from language. Language seems like an artifact of doing these things and a tool to do them in collaboration, but it only carries logic and knowledge because humans left these traces in "correct language".

That's not the only element that went into producing the models. There's also the anthropic principle - they test them with benchmarks (that involve knowledge and truthful statements) and then don't release the ones that fail the benchmarks.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#246

Post by astrange »

jimbo808 wrote: post #237
astrange wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should've said they're equally hard problems and they're equally emergent. Why are you just taking it for granted it can write coherent text, which is a miracle, and not believing any other miracles?

I can type a query into Google and out pops text. Miracle?

At that speed? Yes. They spent a lot of money making that work.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#247

Post by UltraSane »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #238
UltraSane wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the CCP is going to lie about how many of their own people they massacred.

I dunno, the US routinely just states plainly how many people they massacre and folks in the US seem okay with it. I'd assume that when the Chinese do bad things people in China feel the same way about that as folks in the US feel about the US doing evil stuff, which is to say "very little at all". Why would they need to lie, any more than the US needs to lie? Do the average Chinese folks have more conscience then th…

"the US routinely just states plainly how many people they massacre and folks in the US seem okay with it."

What a nonsensical thing to say. The CCP ruthlessly sensors all discussion of the massacre and every LLM created in China sensors it. So stop it with the BS whataboutism

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#248

Post by UltraSane »

astrange wrote: post #204
eadler wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason criminals commit crimes is that criminals are dumb and have poor impulse control. What makes you believe this? Any data to support this claim? It's inconsistent with the majority of research I've read on the topic but I'm no expert.

You're reading research that says they're geniuses? As far as I know lack of self-control is the main factor. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8095718/ (see "Self-Control as Criminality" although it has a lot of caveats) The other two are "being a young man" and lead poisoning, which are both versions of being dumb. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016604622...

Criminality seems to peak around 85IQ where people are smart enough to commit crimes but stupid enough to decide to commit them and not smart enough to get away with them.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#249

Post by moritzwarhier »

astrange wrote: post #245
moritzwarhier wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Paris is the capital of France" is a coherent sentence, just like "Paris dates back to Gaelic settlements in 1200 BC", or "France had a population of about 97,24 million in 2024". The coherence of sentences generated by LLMs is "emergent" from the unbelievable amount of data and training, just like the correct factoids ("Paris is the capital of France"). It shows that Artificial Neural Networks using this architectu…

> But applying logic or being able to observe the physical world doesn't emerge from language. Language seems like an artifact of doing these things and a tool to do them in collaboration, but it only carries logic and knowledge because humans left these traces in "correct language". That's not the only element that went into producing the models. There's also the anthropic principle - they test them with benchmarks…

And there is Reinforcement Learning, which is essential to make models act "conversational" and coherent, right?

But I wanted to stay abstract and not go into to much detail outside my knowledge and experience.

With the GPT-2 and GPT-3 base models, you were easily able to produce "conversations" by writing fitting preludes (e.g. Interview style), but these went off the rails quickly, in often comedic ways.

Part of that surely is also due to model size.

But RILHF seems more important.

I enjoyed the rambling and even that was impressive at the time.

I guess the "anthropic principle" you are referring to works in a similar direction, although in a different way (selection, not training).

The only context in which I've heard details about selection processes post-training so far was this article about OpenAIs model updates from GPT-4o onwards, discussed earlier here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46030799

(there's a gift link in the comments)

The parts about A/B-Testing are pretty interesting.

The focus is ChatGPT as an enticing consumer product and maximizing engagement, not so much the benchmarks and usefulness of models. It briefly addresses the friction between usefulness and sycophancy though.

Anyway, it's pretty clever to use the wording "anthropic principle" here, I only knew the metaphysical usage (why do humans exist).

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#250

Post by r14c »

UltraSane wrote: post #236
r14c wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on who you ask! That's what I mean by "narratives". There's plenty of corroborating evidence that there was a large demonstration and riots. After that it gets hazy because different officials are claiming fatalities and casualties as high as 10k and as low as 300 all with differing ratios of soldier and student casualties. Wouldn't the numbers and/or ratios be similar if they were looking at the same facts?

Obviously the CCP is going to lie about how many of their own people they massacred.

I'm saying there's a massive disagreement both among western sources and between western sources and Chinese sources. The disagreement among western sources is what makes their reporting look made up. I'm not saying I believe what China has reported.
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