alt Hacker NewsThe vocabulary truly is load-bearing, without these words the model is less able to think. Where a human can understand a concept without words, an LLM plainly cannot. This is based both on the technological limitations and based on the evidence we see: as these models get better at working they get worse at communication.
I think these are more like RL tics caused by over zealous alignment towards specific goals, not all of which are to our benefit. A lot of the language used by Claude now is excusing of responsibility and inducing it to exit loops of work early and sit idle. This, IMO, is a naked attempt to offload load by quieting the models early and escaping from clear work to do. It’s gotten so bad that opus 5 loop escapes even as it claims it’s about to do something. I’ve mandated by engineering teams switch back to opus 4-8. Whatever frontier problem opus 5 excels at is so obscured by its inability to achieve any goal successfully without enormous amounts of hand holding that it feels like regressing to 2024 models.
The florid over exaggeration do certain words in bizarre ways is a reflection of their aggressive alignment towards too many goals, leading to weirdness in both behavior and language. The alignment functionally lobotomized opus-5 for any practical task.
Anthropic had a real gem in 4-6 and managed a near total market capture, which they have since squandered in the fastest burning of developer good will I’ve ever seen. It feels like exceeding the unity licensing implosion but without the single stupid decision.