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by js8 6 days ago
Even if they published the conversation, Anthropic (and likely other closed model publisher) no longer provide logs of the actual thinking process.

I more and more see LLMs as a kind of scam; not useless, but really just a big database of fuzzy facts with some Prolog on top as rediscovered by the learning algorithm. Most likely could be made much cheaper to run, were humans allowed to actually inspect the algorithm.
2 comments
emp17344 6 days ago
They do everything they can to mystify results like this, because then many are inclined to view AI as “magical”. Marketing works.
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js8 6 days ago
Yes, I think this idea, that it should be "magical", is what makes it feel scummy. (Apparently I am not alone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988475). It makes AI providers sound like snake oil salesmen, and rightfully so.

Meanwhile, technological and engineering (STEM) progress have always been made by emphasizing externalization of the deductions (as opposed to reference to an opaque expert judgement) and reproducibility of experimental results.

I would even call the frontier AI labs anti-scientific. We need to understand how inference is done to avoid mistakes, not rely on intuition, even if the intuition is enclosed in a reproducible machine. The idea that AI should be this closed is a return to pre-scientific days.

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baq 6 days ago
The tweet was posted by an Anthropic employee which makes it not unreasonable to believe that they have the trace available and stashed away.

Not that it would be necessarily helpful; J-space trace (of all things...) would be more worthwhile if you ask me

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