alt Hacker News> we can surely have the verifiers explain those
This is not obvious to me at all. LLMs are capable of amazing feats of reverse engineering but are terrible at explaining and abstracting things well.
I think this is an artefact of how we train them, and they could be trained to be better at this if we focused on it, but at the same time, it shows its possible for these things to be able to do things they cant explain to us (granted, they can't explain them well - you can bash your way to understanding with them anyway but they aren't good at it)
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And in many cases it is not really the new solution that is important. It is the new techniques, abstractions, or other sense-making or investigative tools that made the solution possible that matter.
And the abstractions do still matter, since in many cases it is an issue of tractability. Perhaps an LLM can force its way to a solution through 3 million mind numbingly boring and convoluted steps, but if the number of steps increases exponentially without the right abstraction that means it can only handle a slightly larger problem than a human with pen and paper.
> This is not obvious to me at all. LLMs are capable of amazing feats of reverse engineering but are terrible at explaining and abstracting things well.
It's amazing to me that language models are still such poor writers and communicators. The mathematics community wrestled with this recently, when many solutions dropped into their laps but were not explained very well...
Thing is, (1) generic LLMs will improve, and (2) their lack of ability in this area has a lot to do with the rhetorical and structural habits they pick up during RLHF/instruction-tuning, which trained them for general-purpose comms. Zero-training base models can presumably be trained specifically to communicate scientific concepts. Interesting times.
(Edited to add: With respect to (1), compare Opus 5 to 5.5. 5 was a terrible communicator, even of software/coding concepts, whereas 5.5 is excellent and leaves very little to be desired.)