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Comment by krackers | Hacker News Reader

> this uses a harness

This seems like an arbitrary restriction. Tool-use requires a harness, and their whitepaper never defines exactly what counts as valid.

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Right, fair, but look at the prompt. For the purpose of testing general intelligence, this seems kind of pointless.

It isn't arbitrary. They want measure the capability of the general LLM

So if I say "I want to measure your capability as a mechanic" but then also "to ensure an accurate score you're forbidden to use any tools" how are you the human mechanic planning to diagnose and fix the engine problem without wrenches and jack stands and the like? It makes no sense.

That said their harness isn't generic. It includes a ridiculously detailed prompt for how to play this specific game. Forbidding tool use is arbitrary and above all pointless hoop jumping but that doesn't make the linked "achievement" any less fraudulent.

It is more like restricting the mechanic to only using commercially available tools and not allow them to create CUSTOM tools.

No, that would be analogous to disallowing customized harnesses, ie tooling specially crafted by someone else for the specific task at hand. Insisting that an LLM solve something without the ability to make use of any external tooling whatsoever is almost perfectly analogous to insisting that a human mechanic work on a car with nothing but his own bare hands.

The wrench is to the mechanic as the stock python repl is to the LLM.

They want the LLM that does the ARC-AGI-3 to be the same LLM that everyone uses.

Rephrase that in terms of the human mechanic and hopefully you can see the error of that reasoning. LLMs that perform tasks (as opposed to merely holding conversations) use tools just like we do. That's literally how we design them to operate.

In fact the LLMs that everyone uses today typically have access to specialized task specific tooling. Obviously specialized tools aren't appropriate for a test that measures the ability to generalize but generic tools are par for the course. Writing a bot to play a game for you would certainly serve to demonstrate an understanding of the task.

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