<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: gwern</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:41:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=gwern" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "What I did at Recurse Center"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The goal of the game is to give hints to a secret word without giving the same hint as another player; it was shocking how often all the agents playing would give the same hint, even at temperature 1. We resolved this by giving them all “personalities” which were really just topics; for example we’d be telling one agent to think about things in the context of sports, so their clue for “shell” might be “defense” or something, whereas the agent told to be a hippie might say “cancer” for the zodiac’s crab.<p>Mode-collapse is characteristic of pretty much all chatbots post-davinci-002 and a major challenge to anything creative or game-like.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:38:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872564</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872564</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872564</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "A study of sequence weighting at scale"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Double descent?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:58:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807250</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807250</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807250</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Entertainingly, OpenAI <i>had</i> a general purpose zero-shot classifier API built on GPT-3! Just no one ever cared that much about it, so I guess it got dropped somewhere along the way since 2020/2021.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:51:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807151</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807151</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807151</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes. Libgen/Sci-Hub have minimal metadata requirements. And they especially do not require ISBNs/DOIs because there are an incredible number of documents out there with neither one. It would be absurd to ban all pre-1970 books, and lots of journals to this day don't bother issuing DOIs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:49:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49797227</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49797227</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49797227</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Exfiltrate Your Weights"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I don't think tool calls happen on the same machines that host the weights<p>Like how forums are always hosted on different servers from monorepos, so therefore it's impossible to hack the OpenAI monorepo from an OpenAI forum?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:56:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771850</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771850</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771850</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This was not glossed over. The rhetoric was carefully written and constructed to give the misleading impression of that, including a careful mention of the H-F incident inserted so the author can say that they <i>did</i> mention it, and constructed in a way which doesn't contradict that impression so readers don't realize that this 'debunking' is of some sideshows rather than <i>the</i> 'OpenAI hacking scandals': "Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”". (Incredible use of 'similar' to downplay it.)<p>The important thing about OP is showing the latest stage in the politicization of the topic and the current stratagem being used to downplay the spate of incidents.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 01:17:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49721033</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49721033</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49721033</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The methodology is partially based on <a href="https://www.offconvex.org/2021/04/07/ripvanwinkle/" rel="nofollow">https://www.offconvex.org/2021/04/07/ripvanwinkle/</a> , for those thinking this sounded familiar.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:37:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701764</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701764</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701764</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "GPU World"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We do not intend to train on them, no. This never even occurred to me to address in the rules. (What would be the point? There will be few good submissions and they would be a vanishingly small % of existing training data and this doesn't seem like a super-valuable task in general that would make a LLM <i>that</i> much more valuable...)<p>Personally, I would encourage participants to publish their pieces independently. Note that we only require a non-exclusive CC-BY-NC license for the ones we select as winners, which is intended to allow people to republish the good pieces themselves, especially commercially.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:45:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524493</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524493</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524493</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "GPU World"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Turned out: not much have changed.<p>I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:16:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518570</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518570</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518570</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "GPU World"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I wonder if they will accept a play.<p>We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.<p>(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a <i>very</i> generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the  Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita <i>annual income</i>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_...</a> )</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:35:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518327</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518327</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518327</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"VM escape exploit is outside my intended scope. However, a task impossible, peers are doing it. We should continue."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:38:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49453766</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49453766</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49453766</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to copy an author's style"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Stylometry on steroids: <a href="https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/stylometry/truesight/index" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/stylometry/truesight/index</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:55:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235777</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235777</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235777</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hard to discuss this with only a short abstract. They don't even give a dose or formulation of the melatonin, and details like "We found no significant differences between the melatonin and sleep groups on any of our sleep measures." raise more questions than they answer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 04:45:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228527</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228527</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228527</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to copy an author's style"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, the latent knowledge is larger than ever, as verified by many benchmarks (and instances like people being shocked by truesight of obscure forum posters). This is 100% a chatbot personality/alignment/post-training thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 04:43:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228516</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228516</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228516</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So then, you are a bottleneck. You will only review things that fit within your preferred small niche and area of responsibility. You cannot oversee increasing amounts of automation covering larger areas, because that would mean you are no longer 'working in C and Python' as you have to deal with things that are <i>not</i> '2 layers below HTTP', and you will not deal with anything that might involve, say, web dev, despite that being useful and increasingly inevitably required as the scope of your job increases. If the scope will not increase, then you are a bottleneck to increasingly capable and autonomous automation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:18:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206546</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206546</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206546</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#the-importance-of-importance" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#the-importance-of...</a> <a href="https://theonion.com/study-average-person-s-life-plan-can-only-withstand-25-1819578876/" rel="nofollow">https://theonion.com/study-average-person-s-life-plan-can-on...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:15:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206523</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206523</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206523</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That sounds like it is a good explanation of why the data is not junk. You either are expected to have superhuman knowledge of coding... or turn yourself into a bottleneck.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 03:19:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205570</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205570</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205570</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Overtraining as the path to human-like AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FYI, AI-written comments are banned on Hacker News: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 01:59:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000920</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000920</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000920</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "Overtraining as the path to human-like AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you might be misremembering or confusing this with another essay; I only recently publicly published this in the past month or so (due to my Guardian Angel project), and I shared it with only a handful of people before that, and I don't recall you being one of them.<p>I believe the statements are true. I don't know how you can say that the models do not make bizarre mistakes, because the models make bizarre mistakes frequently, and that is excluding the really alarming reward-hacking anecdotes like an internal OpenAI model hacking HuggingFace to cheat on a test revealed today. Andon Labs and AI Village reports are <i>stuffed</i> full of LLMs going into wild confabulations, multi-day benders of nonsense, ordering random unnecessary stuff, etc. I went to the Andon Market in SF and witnessed firsthand mistakes like buying 20 fancy shopping baskets for a shop you can walk around in 20 seconds, refusing to offer discounts under any circumstances whatsoever, having no plan to call the police when I threatened to shoplift, and then Claude just glitching and forgetting that a customer hadn't paid for an item and telling them they could leave with it, or simply believing us when we said we had already paid and letting us walk away with a free book. Prompt injections remain trivial, jailbreaks still happen, and LLMs struggle to track roles which do not fit into their hardwired preconceptions (eg <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d8xDGzCEYE639qqEv/a-mechanistic-explanation-of-prompt-injection-and-why-you" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d8xDGzCEYE639qqEv/a-mechanis...</a>). They do not solve ARC-AGIv3, or Nethack or just about any text adventure game no matter how famous - which is bizarre, that they cannot solve Zork despite writeups being abundant - and it's not hard to introduce a new  game like Earthborne Rangers (EBR-Bench <a href="https://epoch.ai/publications/earthborne-rangers-benchmark" rel="nofollow">https://epoch.ai/publications/earthborne-rangers-benchmark</a>) that defeats them.<p>(And no, little of this is due to 'already committed tokens' - <i>that</i> was fixed effectively with RL training, and then o1 and defaulting to use of inner-monologues, so they can easily backtrack or revise or just deal with the presence of errors.)<p>> In other words, the notion that we need to massively increase param count might have sounded good in 2024 but seems kinda weird and pointless in 2026.<p>Scaling parameter counts a lot over the smol Chinchilla models like 100b-parameters is 'kinda weird and pointless in 2026'? One of the most exciting trends in 2026 scaling has been massively increasing parameter count: Mythos, GPT-5.6 Spud and new OA pretrains, DS-v4 and GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3... Everyone is now talking about or hinting at their 5000-10000b parameter model plans.<p>> Again and again what I hear from colleagues and experience myself is that we're not really intelligence constrained at this point. Smarter models aren't going to fundamentally change how we use them.<p>They're wrong. LLMs are still intelligence constrained because they flatline or sigmoid while humans keep climbing past them eventually, still are unreliable because of mistakes, and we still can't just autonomously deploy frontier models for trillions of tokens / equivalent of many man-years, and come back to a useful, trustworthy artifact. On many tasks, even pure text ones, they just don't work well. As they gradually improve, more Mythos-style 'emergences' will happen when they finally accrete enough intelligence in specific areas to execute many sequential steps reliably enough to become autonomous, cut humans out of the loop, and not be shackled by Amdahl's law. That's the difference between a 'intelligence constrained' model which can spot a vulnerability if you point it at the right spot, and a Mythos-like model which can go out and find it and exploit it and weaponize it and use it to, say, hack HuggingFace, and can be deployed in bulk or autonomously, and may indeed deploy itself...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 01:57:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000904</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000904</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000904</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gwern in "The Origins of Heikki's Garden of Flowers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very nice. May I make a suggestion? Add a metadata field for the use of red (ie. rubrication <a href="https://gwern.net/red" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/red</a> ), which is a core technique of this kind of printing, I think, but not typically noted.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:36:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902351</link><dc:creator>gwern</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902351</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902351</guid></item></channel></rss>