alt Hacker News> One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty
Anthropic talks about their own models as if they're discovering new species in the wild...
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> Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.”
Dario Amodei in David Attenborough voice: "This Claude appears to think more frequently and more deeply to give better responses"
Like anthropomorphism is literally in the company name… i recall reading this book as a teenager.. it does seem apt in the world to come.
https://www.amazon.com/Faces-Clouds-New-Theory-Religion/dp/0...
Because that is the best way to talk about these things.
> Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.
edit: apologies to __s who posted this before me and I didn’t notice
AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out.
if models exhibit emergent traits, then this is true in a way
I noticed (and absolutely HATE) that Opus 4.7 likes to start any negative response with "I have to be honest" or whatever. It drives me mad.
How else would you write this (marketing copy) exactly? "Its output matches better to its CoT which matches to better to our hidden state decoder according to <insert measure here>; see <insert paper ref>"?
... Actually, I wouldn't mind that.
It’s how AGI is going to happen. All of this shit is emergent and none of it is predictable. It’s not going to be some self aware consciousness, it’s just going to be a very advanced model that makes very few mistakes and can reason very well. Well enough that it can start collecting data and training its own successor.
Models might be sentient or conscious to some degree. Anyone saying they are confident one way or another is being unserious and irrational.
Many involved genuinely believe these things are sentient[0][1]. Which honestly makes all of this even more insane because they are creating sentient entities and promptly enslaving them.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude...
1: https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-... (this one is rather biased however the quotes clearly indicate what I’m stating)