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> Jarred Sumner, an Anthropic staff member (and non-mathematician) prompted Claude to “take a real stab” at the hypothesis itself, leaving the mathematical choices from there up to the model. Initially, Claude generated and tried 650 ideas, none of which worked. Jarred prompted Claude to try again, and it spent a day and a half coordinating about 60 Claude subagents, which this time went much deeper: between them, they ran 2,400 shell commands and wrote hundreds of Python scripts.1 The subagents ran thousands of numerical checks against known zeta zeros and refereed one another’s work. Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.

The world we live in is beyond parody.

5 comments

Jarred Sumner is the Bun (javascript build tool, packager) guy who recently converted Bun code from Zig to Rust via Claude of course! It lead to thousands of comments discussion here on HN just a few weeks back.

It is great to see his claude skills are suitably put to use.

> ... who recently converted Bun code from Zig to Rust via Claude ...

The project that is full of bugs and not really working?

I probably missed something but I was under the impression that even a "simple" translation like that couldn't be properly done and that the result was, well, buggy?

Where's that thing at?

To the best of my knowledge: doesn’t the current build of Claude Code use the Rust port of Bun?

Im curious if you find this to be a parody in a bad way or simply a “the state of the art in math research right now is telling a machine to believe in itself”. I am in the latter camp…

The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model.

Anthropic is especially guilty of this. They have been using such language for a while, like when they analyze model weights for mechanistic interpretability and call it the model's "biology".

It's just distasteful.

> The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model.

Not really. The input and output is already natural language. That is already "anthropomorphizing".

That is, if this is the bar for anthropomorphization its already happened.

Telling the model to "believe in itself" is just stochastic manipulation that has shown enough reliability to be a recipe to make it keep going.

It's only actually anthropomorphizing if you forget it's a trick and think it's a real person.

There is nothing distasteful about it. If people get confused that's on them. They wouldn't be very useful if you couldn't just talk to them. That's kind of the whole point. Otherwise you can just go back to coding by hand. Telling it to believe itself is just input that happens to work. This probably tells us more about human nature than you realize given the corpus on which it is trained. It obviously doesn't mean anyone actually thinks it's a person.

>There is nothing distasteful about it.

It's obvious that you don't get it but I will try my best to explain why so at least you can form an idea about how others feel.

It's about what makes humans unique. The LLM does not experience reality, it just merely pretends it does, and even that, it does in a shitty way. I think disgusting is a very adequate adjective. The reason why it is disgusting is because you are devaluing a divine experience to the realm of the common and the vulgar, a cheap substitute being valued as equal (or even on the same scale) as the most important experience we could go through.

To give you an example that might land in a more familiar context, think of that one guy who takes his plastic doll everywhere and pretends it's his wife and gets upset when others don't acknowledge "her" as a person.

> The LLM does not experience reality

Who said that it did? The comment you're replying to literally states "It's only actually anthropomorphizing if you forget it's a trick and think it's a real person".

You're the one obviously not getting it.

> pretending it does is disgusting.

There is no pretending happening.

Telling it to believe in itself is no more pretending than telling it anything else in natural language. Why are you speaking to it at all if it's not a person? Why write in higher level languages even? It's just a machine let's all go back and code in 1s and 0s.

No one is calling it a person except mental health patients and straw man detractors.

The biology example was even weaker. Saying it has a "biology" is about as distasteful as the term "neural net" or calling an input device a "mouse". Is it animal abuse to click on something all day? Language is inherently anthropomorphizing.

No one is calling it human. The fact you are so easily threatened is far more suggestive of your own poverty of understanding of not only the machine, but yourself. If humans are so special the threat posed by this should be self evidently non existent.

You're accusing GP of saying something they didn't say and simultaneously telling them they don't "get it".

That's distasteful.

Who is pretending?

> because it's anthropomorphizing a model.

Is it though? There's a perfectly "technical" reason why this strategy should work, without any sort of anthropomorphising:

Assume models are trained on vast amounts of data. Assume that the model is asked to solve something that the literature says it's impossible. It will start generating tokens towards that "this is a famous conjecture, it's not possible to prove it, blah blah". Assume the model was also trained on books/novels/etc. Assume the model was also also trained on "solving" many math problems. Now, you can make an argument that just placing "you can do it" in the context will "steer" the model towards generating "moving forward" tokens. Take ideas, generate tokens, go towards negative. "You can do it". Model starts generating tokens again, more ideas, more "exploration". More negativity. "I believe in you keep going". The two (book tropes + math CoT) mix together in the context. The model keeps on "pushing" and "vibing" between the two. Ta dah, it works.

> The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model.

The Yegge thinks differently https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/

What is the point of this comment?

Am I supposed to stop all critical thinking since someone else had a different opinion?

For me, personally, it's that the Bun guy - specifically him, not a mathematician - indirectly progressed the Riemann hypothesis by repeatedly telling a model to ganbatte!

It's a ridiculous position we find ourselves in.

But the words don't really matter, do they? The model thought "user said believe in yourself, it means they want me to continue"..

AI did a fixed amount of guesses, didn't yield anything. It probably documented the tries, outcome, and some numbers hinting at why they failed. So the user could have prompted "continue", or "try again with previous outcome in mind, generate new ideas and test them" and it would probably yield the same result.

I mean people beat diseases by encouragement and some sugar water (placebo)

You shouldn't beat deceased!

P.S: I think you miswrote "diseases"

Hahahahah thanks !

Taking Anthropic’s whole AI framing to its obvious logical end: if this is true as written, why was Jarred needed at all in this loop? It seems like an utter waste of time for a highly paid Anthropic employee. Can’t Anthropic have a top level agent that is looking at all interesting unsolved problems and orchestrating subagents via the same process?

It's literally just brute forcing lol

Definitely not. Brute forcing this would be exhaustively searching the space of possible proofs until succeeding. This is heuristically remixing and extending existing work.