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Comment by chpatrick | Hacker News Reader

Is that what it feels like when the models get smarter than us?

No the models are just ass at communication without being directed.

Try asking them to make useful diagrams for some stuff in a codebase, out of the box without excessive hand holding they don't make good choices about what's worth communicating and how to do it.

You see this in their pointless frontend copy all the time too.

Like any time you make them do any UI without strict directions they'll almost always add a label describing the feature somewhere. Ask for a calculator, and instructions for what the different buttons do might appear in the bottom out of nowhere for example.

Same concept of "over-sharing" seems to prevalent in a bunch of domains when it comes to LLMs, sometimes more visible, sometimes less.

A smarter model would know how to communicate with you correctly, and not just throw jargon it has just invented at you without explaining it.

s/model/engineer

But if you have two experts in a field talking to each other you wouldn't expect them to dumb down their communication.

Effective jargon usage is understood by the target audience.

If the AI is communicating to me and can't select the appropriate jargon level, it's failing at communicating effectively.

Or you're below its level.

That's a loadbearing, heavy shaped, second take worthy statement

As long as the linguistics are the issue rather than raw inability to understand the concepts being communicated, then the model is just being a bad communicator.

Concise, jargon free or limited explanation is the opposite of dumbed down. It requires to most skill and understanding to do well. Opus 4.8/5, for whatever reason, are getting worse at this crucial skill.

No, a smart model should also give a concise executive summary, "brevity is the soul of wit".

So, in short, once models get smart enough they stop bothering telling us what they did.

Yeah, makes sense. A parent wouldn't bother explaining the details of their job to a toddler.

Which would be fine, but the parents also just smeared tomato sauce over the walls too, so let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.

"There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either."

Guess that's the exact point of the "intelligence" benchmarks

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