Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheepscreek | Hacker News Reader

Drag handle = most likely literally a drag event (javascript) handler/callback. Dead, perhaps because it’s an empty function, or it gets overwritten, or for some other reason is never called?

Most of what it said about the facts was intelligible actually. But I still couldn’t understand the connection or its significance. We may be staring at the future of AI - a form of intelligence that is alien to us.

View on HN

An Alien Mind: https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/

OpenAI reflecting on how they're discovering the current form of LLM intelligence/reasoning to be "alien"; a kind of "Intellect we don’t fully understand".

I lost the link to that short story about humans in the future whose job it is to read and interpret Ai output like it's aliens. Good story! Anyone have the link?

Maybe Ted Chiang's The Evolution of Human Science?

If this kind of "AI-speak" becomes ubiquitous and humans reading it becomes the norm (whether to guide AI or other reasons), I'd imagine future generations (of humans) who grow up with it will be able to understand and work with it much better than we do. Future humans' brains will probably be wired a bit differently, similar to multilingual speakers of today. We may even see "AI language" classes become a common part of school curriculums. Although, I think AI will probably advance enough that most people will never even need to communicate on "its level", but it's probably a good idea to keep humans in the loop either way, and in which case, understanding the more advanced "AI vocabulary" might be useful.

You're giving it too much credit. There's no master plan or secret depth to the word vomit Opus 5 was spewing. I suspect it's just the result of Anthropic optimizing other characteristics of the product like staying focused and covering edge cases in coding, which CC has definitely gotten way better at just in the last 6 months. The degradation in writing style was probably an unintended side effect of other optimizations they were making. Admittedly it works okay for internals, and has the side effect of increasing token spend, but I am 100% sure that it could reduced by 90-99% without losing ANY signal, if there was just some better heuristics for what to say where (tech spec, inline comment, commit message, CLAUDE.md, PR should have different things) and better judgement for what to distill to represent at different zoom levels.

I wasn't referring to the current state of Opus 5 output. I was referring to possible future information density (vocabulary and sentence structure) that LLMs may evolve to use.

ah okay, that makes sense

But that assumes this is a net improvement on linguistic efficiency rather than an artifact. Given that they tried to RL away from this style in 5.1 I'm not terribly bullish of Claudlish becoming something people try and learn. It being dense is less the issue than it being vacuous (as another commenter mentioned here). It's just very unclear and ambiguous writing. I think it has no place anywhere that needs language to be put to productive use.

I agree with you here, but to make it clear what I meant, I'll reiterate what I said in a sibling comment: I wasn't referring to the current state of Opus 5 (or even Fable 5.1) output. I was referring to possible future information density (vocabulary and sentence structure) that LLMs may evolve to use.

What is a half day? Is this referencing wasted time in a hang? I’ve seen it in agent output from time to time and it’s not clear if it’s referring to a hang or a code name it’s given some meaning to.

It seems to be some unit accounting for "wasted time" or "useless work".-

It's not a general trend. It's only Opus 5.

Sonnet-5 does the same

Fable 5 is the same

No second reason; checked not recalled -- it's just saying that it is checking this instead of trying to remember it (there's probably some internal Claude / Claude Code system instruction to always check code instead of remembering)

Yeah I think when it talks like this it's signaling to some (imagined) automated grader that it fulfilled a given constraint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com