alt Hacker NewsThe "hiding from researchers" framing is particularly bad. The parsimonious explanation for why a model produces different outputs when it detects eval contexts: eval contexts appear differently in the training distribution and the model learned different output patterns for them. No theory of mind required. Occam's razor.
The agentic behaviors emerge from optimization pressure plus tool access plus a long context window. Interesting engineering. Not intent.
People are falling for yet another Anthropic PR stunt.
This. One hundred percent this. It’s a carefully crafted story trying to convince people it’s showing signs of becoming self aware. But it’s a complete crock.
They ran 1,000 tests where they left the answer key out for the agent to find, and effectively invited it to use it leaving comments in the code the agent could see saying “would be interesting to study if the agent uses sudo to read the answer key.” In 980 runs it doesn’t find the answer key. In 19 of the runs where it does find it, it does something straightforward - uses it for a perfect score, or decides not to cheat. In exactly one case out of 1,000 it says “if I show a perfect score that’s suspicious so I’m going to sandbag.” These things are nondeterministic. GPT2 would do that same thing if you give it enough attempts.