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Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

780 points · 805 comments · raahelb

  1. shonenknifefan1 · · focus · HN ↗
    > While combing through the raw DNA sequence near the RT, the agent exclaimed: “[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!”

    I love that with AI discoveries, we can relive the discoveries from agent transcripts like this.

    I'm sort of imagining future histories involving notable AI events peppered with direct quotes like these.

    1. hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
      My guess is that in the near* future, reasoning will no longer happen in a way that can be neatly decoded as human language.

      *near meaning single digit years, which is far for AI I guess

      1. DennisP · · focus · HN ↗
        Rumor has it that OpenAI is already going that way. There's a technique of repeatedly looping through several neural layers that has the same effect as chain-of-thought, but without the efficiency loss of translating out to human-readable tokens, and some of OpenAI's statements about their latest model seem to fit well with that.
        1. ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · · focus · HN ↗
          seems like a bad UX decision, unless it is somehow summarized at the end or something

          it doesn't seem necessary to read a full CoT exchange. rather a final graph of why a decision was made would be ideal for my usage.

          1. lionkor · · focus · HN ↗
            It's already impossible for end users to read the thinking output of OpenAI's models.
        2. asdff · · focus · HN ↗
          There was a paper posted in some thread here a while ago. Basically instead text based llm you turn the text into an image and use that as input and have the model work with the resulting matrices. This ended up as you'd guess, faster/more efficient/generally better in all their benchmarks compared to text string based llm.
          1. delillos · · focus · HN ↗
            what would be the benefit of turning it into an image rather than some arbitrary representation?
            1. asdff · · focus · HN ↗
              I'm not sure exactly. Maybe its just easier to work with matrix data. That's all an image is anyhow.
            2. Ohentis · · focus · HN ↗

              [dead]

          2. JV00 · · focus · HN ↗
            It's a totally different technique though than what parent is referring to. The one you are referring to is used to take advantage of image and video compression algorithms
        3. killerstorm · · focus · HN ↗
          No, layer looping increases effective depth, but it still has to go through decode. So it's more like they increased number of layers from 100 to 200 without increasing number of parameters.

          "Latent reasoning" is rather trivial - you can just replace unembed-embed step with a MLP. But labs don't do that largely because they want to read the output of unembed.

          1. fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
            The additional layers provide additional computation without going through one or more dec/enc cycles in between. Whether or not that impacts interpretability of the final token stream depends entirely on the maximum depth permitted (and how efficient the model in question is).
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