Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

I really wonder how it converged on its style. It's pretty unique and terrible. It's not like it's just mimicking something or it was purposefully design to be that way. I mean the reason may be diffuse and uninteresting... just the result of a lot of factors and lack of control over the writing style probably.

But oddly enough its still great at coding. Just like a lot of people it either interfaces well with people or machines but not both.

View on HN

I assume it’s largely a side effect from the final RL in post training?

That’s the step that causes the most significant gains in agentic performance.

But the RL doesn’t care about anything except maximizing the score, so if you only score based on coding benchmarks, anything can happen to the writing style (as long as it doesn’t hurt the coding performance).

That’s why it often gets worse on models that simply had more RL post training from the same base.

Reinforcement learning for specific use-cases like coding that degrade it's writing style... makes sense. Maybe it stands to reason later version of Opus were improved more by this sort of fine-tuning. Feels consistent with the observation of diminishing returns and worsening writing style. Wonder what changed (supposedly) in 5.5.

Does Xiaomis approach help with this? They do all the post training steps at the same time instead of one by one, switch topics after a couple prompts so writing style is mixed with coding and tool use.

Apparently it helps generalize skills between areas, which makes sense when you compare it to how humans learn but I don't know if it's the same for LLMs.

For whatever reason, GPT models simply don't have this problem.

It truly was bizarre. I've used every major model since 2022, and not a single one had a writing style as bad as Opus 5

Fable 5 was pretty bad too, but they fixed it with 5.1. Now with Opus 5.5 it seems they fixed it as well

Fable 5.1 is still intolerable. I invariably filter its prose through Astra before inflicting it on myself or anyone else.

I have a theory that they pushed the model away from human writing styles to not get copyright violation nags. In Opus 5.5 they've found a better point in the latent space of styles that is still far away from the human ones.

I've been listening to some old Acquired podcast episodes and they do often talk in this type of Claudish. So it's getting it from Silicon Valley startup podcasters... Great...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com