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

226 points · 79 comments · benbreen

nl · 1790899033 · 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 · 1790905863 · 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq8qO-NjYIg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq8qO-NjYIg
  1. Terr_ · 1790914705 · focus · HN ↗
    One might say a calculator is just another example of "spiky intelligence", merely spikier.
    famouswaffles · 1790917258 · focus · HN ↗
    No, one might not say that. Calculators are not regarded as even a Narrow Intelligence because there's no intelligence. And no, not because of the 'humans so special' or 'it's software!' tautology that oft gets repeated in these discussions. I mean there's no adaptability whatsoever. A Chess bot has it (in its narrow domain of Chess). A calculator does not.
    Terr_ · 1790920928 · focus · HN ↗
    My point (using irony) is that "spiky intelligence" is a somewhat hollow phrase, something that sounds like it could be objective but really it's just a flavor on top of "I'll know it when I see it."
    Take anything "intelligent", alter it to be spikier and spikier, and eventually *poof* somehow the intelligence vanishes. You can do the same with the phrases "flawed intelligence" or "specialized intelligence."
    > Calculators [have] no intelligence. [...] I mean there's no adaptability
    To short-circuit a long discussion, I submit that "adaptability" will (once the Scooby Doo gang catches it) turn out to be "intelligence" in a tautological mask, both equally undefinable except in relation to one-another.
    Something will be intelligent because you perceive adaptability, and it'll be adaptable because you infer intelligence. If it doesn't seem adaptable, it can't be intelligent, and if you don't want it to be intelligent, it won't have "real" adaptability.
    > A Chess bot has [adaptability] (in its narrow domain of Chess). A calculator does not.
    My calculator solves equations with unknown variables, what makes that insufficiently adaptable? What determines the cutoff-point?
    famouswaffles · 1790924070 · focus · HN ↗
    >My (ironic) point is that "spiky intelligence" seems rather unhelpful because the "intelligence" part still operates under the rules of "I just know it when I see it."
    All intelligence is 'spiky' or 'jagged' or whatever, even human intelligence. We evolved in certain environments and situations and sometimes there's a mismatch and it causes all sorts of wonky things. We just call them funny names like optical illusions and cognitive biases. But it's the same thing. I agree there's no point in call LLMs a 'spiky' intelligence, but for probably the oppoosite reasons as you.
    >My calculator solves equations with unknown variables, what makes that insufficiently adaptable? What determines the cutoff-point?
    A chess engine can be dropped into a board position it has never encounterd and search over possible continuations, evaluating and selecting actions based on the state it finds itself in.
    A calculator solving x+3=7 is doing something quite different. The fact that x can take arbtrary values doesn't make the calculator adaptive; it just means the fixed procedure operates over a range of inputs. Every problem a calculator can solve was effectively anticipated when it was built, and anything outside that grammar produces an error with no partial credit. A chess engine can face positions nobody enumerated, in situations nobody could even dream of and still produce sensible moves.
    The core of being intelligent is being able to make decisions independently. That's why we hire smart people - to make better decisions. You can't make decisions if everything is spelt out for you. And naturally, if you can't make decisions, you can't adapt.
    neuroticnews25 · 1790929123 · focus · HN ↗
    >A chess engine can be dropped into a board position it has never encounterd and search over possible continuations, evaluating and selecting actions based on the state it finds itself in.
    Sounds pretty similar to a calculator with a numerical root-finding algorithm, if you only substitute board position it has never encounterd with a polynomial it has never encountered.
    >The core of being intelligent is being able to make decisions independently
    What does it mean for a deterministic algorithm to make decisions?
    card_zero · 1790945951 · focus · HN ↗
    > What does it mean for a deterministic algorithm to make decisions?
    That aspect at least is not an issue, because: what does it mean to say that a dice roll is a "decision"? That's just probability, and it's as mindless as determinism. Some people associate free will with randomness, for no reason other than that it's an escape from the constraint of determinism, but it isn't any more meaningful. Yet just because meaningful thought is pre-determined by physics doesn't stop it from being thought, and hence being a decision.

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