Hacker News: rbuccigrossi

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "ARC-AGI Leaderboard"

rbuccigrossi — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:12:52 +0000

No, I believe you are misunderstanding the quote. Each “question” in ARC-AGI-3 is a game that has hidden rules that you can understand if you look at the game board long enough. This quote means that Opus 5 is looking at the game board, figuring out the rules, and writing out the rules before it makes a single move. You can do the same thing if you go to the ARC-AGI-3 website and try some of the games.

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "Is AI Progress Real? Four Independent Metrics Show It"

rbuccigrossi — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:20:30 +0000

The others are an IQ test (TrackingAI), a test of Ph.D. questions across multiple domains (Humanity's Last Exam), and graphical pattern matching (ARC-AGI-2).

What's interesting is that while they are rather different in nature (yes it is odd that METR measures clock time as opposed to iterations etc.) but the behavior of the resulting improvement curves are extremely close.

That's the punchline: 4 independent measures point to the same conclusion. That increases the chance that the conclusion is correct.

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "Is AI Progress Real? Four Independent Metrics Show It"

rbuccigrossi — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:17:20 +0000

The text is my transcript of the video formatted by Claude and with sources added at the end.

I do use deep research (across Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude) to gather background and ideas, and Claude for editing. I started machine learning and computer vision research back in 1995, studied NLP, and dove into LLMs with GPT-2, so I wouldn't be surprised if my writing has been deeply influenced by AI.

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "Is AI Progress Real? Four Independent Metrics Show It"

rbuccigrossi — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:13:07 +0000

Author here. In short there are 4 different metrics:

- METR's time horizon

- TrackingAI's offline cognitive test

- Humanity's Last Exam, and

- ARC-AGI-2

that have lasted longer than 2 years (though ARC-AGI-2 is now saturated).

When plotted in the linear domain, they all have an exponential (hockey-shaped) curve, but the interesting thing is that the bend happens right at Q4 of 2025 (right when Gemini 3, Opus 4.5, GPT 5.2 all come out).

Is AI Progress Real? Four Independent Metrics Show It

rbuccigrossi — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:39:09 +0000

Article URL: https://skepticcto.substack.com/p/is-ai-progress-real-a-skepticcto

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48971910

Points: 6

# Comments: 6

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "Local AI Hardware: Break Even in 2.6 Years?"

rbuccigrossi — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:21:31 +0000

In short, running a $3,299 GMKtek EVO-X2 (Ryzen AI Max+395 with 198 GB) 24/7 with the Gemma 4 26B-A4B model, being as generous as possible, only saves you $1,279.07/year in inference costs. (120 t/s for output tokens at $0.34/M.)

So, that's how you get a break even at 2.6 years...

Local AI Hardware: Break Even in 2.6 Years?

rbuccigrossi — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:14:11 +0000

Article URL: https://skepticcto.com/news/updates/2026/05/29/LocalAI.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329356

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "Show HN: Decoding the Language Machine – AI video series and CC repo"

rbuccigrossi — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:34:22 +0000

You're first :D

Show HN: Decoding the Language Machine – AI video series and CC repo

rbuccigrossi — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:56:16 +0000

Hi HN! I released 3 parts of an educational video series (out of 6 planned), paired with a GitHub repository containing scripts and artifacts (released under Creative Commons).

- Main Site: https://skepticcto.com/ (includes related AI news articles)

- Code/Artifacts: https://github.com/SkepticCTO/decoding_the_language_machine

- YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SkepticCTO

I’m a 21-year CTO, Ph.D. in CS (U Penn, 1999 in computer vision and ML), and a PI in the NIST AI Safety Initiative Consortium. I spent a 4-month sabbatical making this because I wanted to demystify how LLMs work through a historical perspective (starting in 1948 with Claude Shannon) and scientific skepticism.

The project is old enough to be fleshed out, but young enough to be able to pivot. Is it useful? What would you like to see? I look forward to questions and feedback.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279163

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "Threatening AI Does Not Make It More Useful. Why Sergey Brin Is Wrong"

rbuccigrossi — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:51:10 +0000

We work in the arena of automated AI workflows where consistency of success is vital. When you threaten an LLM you are drawing the LLM into the texts where threats occur (flame wars, parody, etc.). So intuitively you would expect it to work sometimes, but also fail with even more ardent refusal (increasing the variance of success).

Jailbreak approaches like "Bad Likert Judge" ( https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/multi-turn-technique-jai... ) and similar persuasive techniques (see https://xthemadgenius.medium.com/how-persuasion-techniques-c... ) move the text domain to more policy, analysis, or scientific papers, where deeper analysis, discussion, and compliance is the norm.

So I'm curious about the extremes (variance) of success with threatening vs. polite discussion, but I haven't seen direct research on that.

New comment by rbuccigrossi in "Threatening AI Does Not Make It More Useful. Why Sergey Brin Is Wrong"

rbuccigrossi — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:34:38 +0000

Treating an LLM with respect is not about pretending it has feelings; it’s about understanding that every word in your prompt is a signal that shifts the probabilistic landscape from which the model draws its answer. It’s about probability, not personality.

Threatening AI Does Not Make It More Useful. Why Sergey Brin Is Wrong

rbuccigrossi — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:34:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tcg.com/blog/does-being-rude-to-ai-make-it-more-useful-why-sergey-brin-is-wrong/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44302978

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

“End of Support” Does Not Mean “End of Life” for Open Source Projects

rbuccigrossi — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 23:05:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tcg.com/blog/end-of-support-does-not-mean-end-of-life-for-open-source-projects/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23853479

Points: 2

# Comments: 0