alt Hacker NewsWhile Claude's style is obnoxious, I'm more frustrated by its inscrutable explanations.
You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.
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It's interesting that there must be a decision behind that, even if it's just appealing to the RLHF judges for some reason. Maybe there's an intention that if you cannot decipher what the chatbot is saying to you, you will have to ask and burn even more tokens.
Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask.
Sometimes I can't even tell if what it's saying actually makes any sense to someone who understands all the terms its using, or if it's just throwing together words in a way that only make sense to its own model of language.
don't forget LLMs are great at translating between languages, and within the same language. depending on the problem it works on, it will often reach for terminology that tend to be more common or familiar within that problem set. which appears inscrutable, but there's many different ways to skin a cat. just remind it to translate it back to the terminology and subject matter you're already an expert in.
I'm not even sure a PhD helps. It just overuses jargon that has NO meaning. Sometimes, it actually hand waves too much as well while trying to dumb down stuff for you.
I am not sure whether it's a consequence of learning to reason from its traces or some RLHF that trips it into using weird terms to sound smarter to the humans who rate it.