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Sharlinyesterday at 7:34 PM3 repliesview on HN

"You should have a sub-hammer to adversarially enforce that your primary hammer accurately drives nails into wood"

We wouldn't accept such behavior from any other tool, machine, or computer program. At least most of us would not. To paraphrase the old saying: Some people, when confronted with a problem with an AI model think "I know, I'll use an additional AI model." Now they have two problems.

I find it very intriguing that two lineages of models -- from two different companies -- that are supposed to be painstakingly RL'd to become human-level programmers are actually consistently bad at it out of the box in very similar ways. One would think that at least one of OpenAI and Anthropic would (could) have pushed their model to a direction different from "if you can solve a 100-line problem in 10,000 lines, do it".


Replies

pixl97yesterday at 8:12 PM

Human level programmers generally suck too. Unending security holes have been human behavior ever since we started sharing computers.

Also, programming isn't a destination, it is a process and everyone has a different ruleset on what that process looks like. Writing a computer program of any complexity is not a determinalistic process. Trying to compare it to a detemanilisic tool will just leave you with broken analogies and a poorer understanding of the world.

Or another way to say this. If programming were deteminalistic we'd have solved it without AI.

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zzleeperyesterday at 8:06 PM

Also very puzzling to me. And the jargon-speak, albeit is more of an issue for Claude, is still puzzling. Wonder what part of RL led to this.

qarl2yesterday at 11:07 PM

> We wouldn't accept such behavior from any other tool, machine, or computer program.

Von Neumann, 1952: "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components." The whole result is that you get an arbitrarily reliable machine out of unreliable parts by adding more unreliable parts and voting. Every ECC memory and RAID array descends from it.