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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> But I think the fundamental principle is that this approach messes with the distribution in ways that deviate from the trained model.

This. I want the model I'm paying for to be "pure". I don't Anthropic or anyone else messing around with it, especially not for idiotic reasons like facillitating AI stigmatization. The "safety" nonsense is obnoxious enough.

They should train the best possible model and let the weights speak for themselves, not degrade it into some perverted form to appease people who hate AI anyway.

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> I want the model I'm paying for to be "pure".

I don't think the models are pure in any meaningful sense. The labs have some idea of what kind of output they want from the models and then they put a huge amount of effort into training the models on the right sorts of data and massaging the models afterwards to push them towards the desired output. Then at a more practical level there's the layers of filters before your prompt even hits the model (e.g. anthropic's auto-mode classifier), system prompts, response level filtering etc.

You can’t be serious. The weights for composition are massively degraded by RLVR training for coding

I agree, but thats also learned, and it is done to encourage specific responses for a task, different than applying a mask to the distribution based on a key.

> especially not for idiotic reasons like facillitating AI stigmatization.

From the people I’ve talked to at universities, LLM based cheating in education is an unstoppable nightmare. I don’t have a problem with LLMs. But I do want the cheating to - somehow - stop. The people who cheat miss out on learning. And the people who don’t cheat have their degrees devalued by those who do cheat.

> The people who cheat miss out on learning.

They aren't there to learn. They are there to jump through hoops to get a degree that will let them get a job so they can make money and prosper. The learning is entirely secondary.

The cheating will stop when there is no longer any economic incentive to be there in the first place. People with "pure" motives will refuse to cheat on their own, precisely because they want to learn and cheating prevents them from learning.

Watermarking AI output is a treatment for symptoms. The cause is the higher education meme. Somehow, getting a degree just became the default. Can't get a good job without a degree. That meme needs to die, and higher education will never recover its integrity until it does.

Easy to say, hard to come up with a believable alternative. In the meantime, you're flunking out a lot of people for having the integrity to not cheat and as a result not being able to keep up with an artificially inflated workload.

You can't just destroy some signal and handwave that you'll make it up in some other way.

> the integrity

There is none. It's just a jobs program fueled by student loans. Higher education in the west has been corrupt for quite a while now. AI is just the final nail in its coffin.

This is far too cynical. I use what I learned in my computer science program constantly.

I agree that higher education shouldn’t be as required to get a good job. But reality isn't black or white. Reducing the entire sector to a corrupt degree mill throws the baby out with the bath water.

Got any evidence for that claim?

I’ve worked with plenty of smart, self taught programmers throughout my career. The highest paid guy I know didn’t finish high school.

> Got any evidence for that claim?

Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs requiring higher education pay roughly 2x more than those requiring high school education and roughly 3x more than those requiring no education at all.

And even if there's no formal requirement for a degree, it doesn't automatically mean people lacking degrees will get hired either.

Anyone who wants to get a well paying white collar job pretty much needs a degree.

> I’ve worked with plenty of smart, self taught programmers throughout my career.

And how did they get the job? Networking?

> The highest paid guy I know didn’t finish high school.

I think this ought to be the rule, not the exception.

> Jobs requiring higher education pay roughly 2x more than those requiring high school education

This isn’t really evidence either way. Why do companies pay twice as much for people with higher education? We can’t tell from that statistic. Maybe it’s what you learn in class that makes you twice as valuable to potential employers.

> how did they get the job? Networking?

Probably. After all, that’s how most people in our industry find work. Degree or not.

> This isn’t really evidence either way.

I claimed job prospects is the biggest reason why people spend years educating themselves. Evidence of 2-3x higher salaries directly supports that by providing an excellent motive.

I can imagine two different reasons for the higher salaries. Companies may genuinely think higher education makes their employees that much more productive. And you see that in their hiring process.

Or the degree is something else. A marker of status. Or a signal of IQ and conscientiousness, since companies are legally barred from directly issuing IQ tests.

An observation of 2-3x higher salaries for graduates doesn't differentiate these two theories.

But rereading your comments, maybe that was never your argument. You said:

> The learning is entirely secondary. The cheating will stop when there is no longer any economic incentive to be there in the first place.

Companies might be entirely rational in offering 2-3x higher salaries to people with degrees. If that is the case, it's not just a meme. And the economic incentive will remain indefinitely. And universities and companies aren't doing anything wrong here.

Throughout your career, on the job performance matters a lot more in aggregate than your CV. Most people are hired from referrals, after all. If students value the degree over the education itself, they're cheating themselves out of all the benefits - economic and otherwise - that education can provide them throughout their career.

Companies are not in fact legally barred from directly issuing IQ tests, and several major companies do. This is for the most part an Internet urban legend (it has a tiny and irrelevant kernel of truth, in Griggs).

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