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Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

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Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#551

Post by fennecbutt »

Aurornis wrote: post #127
baggachipz wrote: post #82

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

> Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) I don’t see this as an American thing. It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality. You can see the trend in more than LLM output. It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and…

Most tech companies and the dominant pop cultures are all American, etc.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#552

Post by int_19h »

bartread wrote: post #419
klik99 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that GPT5? Reddit users are freaking out about losing 4o and AFAICT it's because 5 doesn't stroke their ego as hard as 4o. I feel there are roughly two classes of heavy LLM users - one who use it like a tool, and the other like a therapist. The latter may be a bigger money maker for many LLM companies so I worry GPT5 will be seen as a mistake to them, despite being better for research/agent work.

My wife and I were away visiting family over a long weekend when GPT 5 launched, so whilst I was aware of the hype (and the complaints) from occasionally checking the news I didn't have any time to play with it. Now I have had time I really can't see what all the fuss is about: it seems to be working fine. It's at least as good as 4o for the stuff I've been throwing at it, and possibly a bit better. On here, sober op…

GPT-5 is extremely "aligned", by which I mean that it will refuse to engage with anything even remotely controversial. I'd say it's worse than Claude in that regard. Whether you care or not depends a lot on what you're doing with it.

That aside, GPT-5 is also very passive. When using it in agentic applications specifically, it will frequently stop and ask for confirmation on absolutely trivial things.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#553

Post by int_19h »

Applejinx wrote: post #364
ryandrake wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually feel like they were trained to be both extremely humble and at the same time, excited to serve. As if it were an intern talking to his employer's CEO. I suspect AI companies executive leadership, through their feedback to their devs about Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and so on, are unconsciously shaping the tone and manner of their LLM product's speech. They are used to be talked to like this, so their prod…

That's what's worrying about the Gemini 'I accidentally your codebase, I suck, I will go off and shoot myself, promise you will never ask unworthy me for anything again' thing. There's nobody there, it's just weights and words, but what's going on that such a coding assistant will echo emotional slants like THAT? It's certainly not being instructed to self-abase like that, at least not directly, so what's going on in…

LLMs running in chat mode are kinda like a character in a book. There's "nobody there" in a sense that the author writing on behalf of the character is not a person, but the character itself is still a person, even if fictional. And therefore it can have meltdowns, because the LLM knows that people do have them. Especially people who are strongly conditioned to be helpful to others, yet are unable to be helpful in some particular instance because of what they perceive as their own inability to deliver.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#554

Post by anal_reactor »

uncircle wrote: post #331
anal_reactor wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, performing social interaction theatre is way more important than actually using logic to solve issues. Look at how many corporate jobs are 10% engineering and 90% kissing people's assess in order to maintain social cohesion and hierarchy. Sure, you say you want "short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans" but guess what - most people say some variation of that, but when they actually se…

That is a fair assessment, but on the other hand, yes men are not required to do things, despite people liking them. You can achieve great things even if your team is made of Germans. My tongue-in-cheek comment wonders if having actors with a modicum of personality to be better than just being surrounded by over-enthusiastic bootlickers. In my experience, many projects would benefit from someone saying “no, that is s…

For some reason, the capitalistic market time and time again favors bootlickers, so there must be some feature of an army of bootlickers that we're missing.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#556

Post by beefnugs »

nojs wrote: post #117

I'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes. If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right" and always challenge, then it will dutifully obey, and always challenge - even when you are, in fact, right. What you really want is "challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am" - which seems to be a lot harder. As another example, one common…

It just takes more creativity (which is also harder to automate) but just run it twice, asking for both the affirmative and the negative, and use your human brain to compare the two qualities of bullet points

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#557

Post by miroljub »

lazide wrote: post #387
miroljub wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this joke works only for natives who know that calf is not cow.

Well, it works because by some common usages, a calf is a cow. Many people use cow to mean all bovines, even if technically not correct.

> Many people use cow to mean all bovines, even if technically not correct.

Come on now :0

I just complained non-natives would have a problem distinguishing between a cow and a calf, and you had to bring those bovines.

To make it easier, would just drop that in my native language, the correct term for bovine is more used to describe people with certain character, that animal kind.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#558

Post by bigmadshoe »

danparsonson wrote: post #501
bigmadshoe wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really missing the points with LLMs and truth if you're appealing to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem

Why?

The limitations of “truth knowing” using an autoregressive transformer are much more pressing than anything implied by Gödel’s theorem. This is like appealing to a result from quantum physics to explain why a car with no wheels isn’t going to drive anywhere.

I hate when this theorem comes up in these sort of “gotcha” when discussing LLMs: “but there exist true statements without a proof! So LLMs can never be perfect! QED”. You can apply identical logic to humans. This adds nothing to the discussion.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#559

Post by Dylan16807 »

svnt wrote: post #546
Dylan16807 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they work then? Because I thought chain of thought made for reasoning. And the first google result for 'chain of thought versus reasoning models' says it does: https://medium.com/@mayadakhatib/the-era-of-reasoning-models... Give me a better source.

Did you even read the article you posted? It supports my statement. CoT produces the linguistic scaffolding for reasoning, but doesn't actually provide much accuracy in doing so. e.g. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/maximize-robotics-performa...

The article I posted says that chain of thought is enough to make something a reasoning model. It's listed as one of the types.

It says that reasoning models "now aim for" more, but that doesn't disqualify the older more basic techniques.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to learn from your link because there's so much vision stuff happening here and that's the focus of the article. Can you link me something about what you need to make a bare minimum reasoning LLM? Text only.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#560

Post by danparsonson »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #558
danparsonson wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

The limitations of “truth knowing” using an autoregressive transformer are much more pressing than anything implied by Gödel’s theorem. This is like appealing to a result from quantum physics to explain why a car with no wheels isn’t going to drive anywhere. I hate when this theorem comes up in these sort of “gotcha” when discussing LLMs: “but there exist true statements without a proof! So LLMs can never be perfect!…

Ah understood, yes that is a bit ridiculous.
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