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Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo

226 points · 79 comments · benbreen

  1. nl · · focus · HN ↗
    > Epistemological weirdness

    > They are also notably bad at judging the historical significance of what they find.

    I use LLMs for some things that are outside the more common use-cases (in my case 3D design for 3D printing) and one thing I've noticed is that the errors it makes are so completely unlike human errors that they are hard to anticipate.

    It will do things like build perfect snap catches but put them so the the pieces they are connecting are rotated 90 degrees from how they should be. It's "dumb" error, but hard to say the model itself if dumb because it does other very hard things so perfectly.

    > seven chord groups

    This sounds a lot more like Opus 5.0 than Opus 5.5 TBH. I wonder if that was an earlier investigation because 5.5 has improved that kind of language a lot.

    1. BoppreH · · focus · HN ↗
      AI capabilities are "spiky": they extend far in some dimensions but fall short in others, seemingly at random. See for example the recent "thus spoke compute" musical[1]. It's an absolute banger, the graphics are impressive, and so is the writing. But some of the metaphors make no sense, the text highlights are in the wrong places, and the train animation at 2:35 is running backwards!

      A person capable of making the rest of the video would never make those mistakes, but an AI does. Perhaps our intelligence is also spiky, and we're just used to the general shape and variance within humans.

      [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Cq8qO-NjYIg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Cq8qO-NjYIg

      1. slim · · focus · HN ↗

          some of the metaphors make no sense
        To be fair some famous rappers are guilty of this, too
        1. huflungdung · · focus · HN ↗

          [dead]

        2. ACCount39 · · focus · HN ↗
          Yeah, it&#x27;s a very human error type - &quot;go for a line that sounds good on the surface but doesn&#x27;t actually make sense&quot; is not at all uncommon. Like, humans will definitely go for a metaphor that falls apart mid-sentence even in a live conversation.

          Something about the way some AIs are trained to write causes them to go for metaphors aggressively - and they don&#x27;t always come up with good ones off the cuff. But they don&#x27;t double back and get rid of the failures.

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