In meme form: https://imgur.com/a/rlmZuU1

(I hope this is ok to post on HN!)

$2M TC. Job: AI cheerleader.

> 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

If there is anything to learn from the history of science, it is that breakthroughs happen via better or new theory and not by brute-force compute [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27794

I feel justified in not expending any effort learning "prompting technique".

Reality has become more absurd than the cyber punk cheese from the 80's that tried to imagine an absurd future

Looking at the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and the difference in what "persistent" models do, it seems reasonable. Like: is this a solvable problem? How much work does the model think is intended to solve this problem? Each input raises the expectation.

And then finally both model output and human input become one world frame for the model, and the human adding a "you can do it!" isn't just input but a frame that colors not just the next step for the model, but also all previous steps (since at each step the model is viewing the totality of the transcript).

That this makes sense only makes it all the more absurd

Broke: the AI is sycophantic to me

Woke: im sycophantic to the AI

Indeed, that's a paragraph straight out of Lem's Cyberiad.

> I remain delighted at how absurd our current timeline has become.

"delighted" is doing a LOT of work there, tbh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do share @simonW's skepticism though. (His blog is my essential reading, FWIW)

On the actual blog post, I'd would be more enthusiastic if Anthropic showed us if the results were repeatable, reproducible, and consistent.

Another technique I've used is to tell agents something already exists. "Grok already solved this" seems to help, or claiming to have suddenly noticed a fatal flaw[0].

0: https://sgnt.ai/p/terrible-mistake/

It’s so delightful how the economy is propped up by circular finance.

It’s so delightful that these genai corpos are undemocratically forcing data centers into our neighborhoods.

It’s so delightful that the data centers steal water, run up the price of electricity, and expel excessive greenhouse gases.

Only a deranged sociopath would find licking the shit stained taint of oligarchs delightful.

it's pretty much a marketing attempt to humanize the LLM (it seems successful from the reaction I see)

Interesting approach. For those who haven't clicked it appears PUA is the Chinese version of a PIP process. So in other words, it simulates a state of distress.

I wonder if at a certain level of intelligence such techniques will give models ammo to pull a HAL and become adversarial to the user in a highly deceptive way.

Sounds really cool, were you able to verify the correctness of the results?

it would be useful to create an account and document your work in a post at https://conwaylife.com/forums, if you're not planning to make a blog post.

Yes, one of the things I find hardest about using Claude code for Mathematics is keeping negativity out of the notes and memory.

First of all, it will convince itself that a task is just too hard and find excuses not to try hard enough.

Then when it struggles on something it loves to write down confusing notes about things which it believes cases the problem. Then next iteration it reads its own note, misinterprets it and completely messes up by trying to avoid some imaginary problem.

The full paragraph quoted for other readers is:

> Two mathematicians at Anthropic studied and validated Claude’s paper, and produced an informal note for experts stating Claude’s proof concisely. Claude also produced a formally verifiable proof of its result. We are grateful to Brian Conrey and Dan Goldston, two experts in this area, who generously examined the paper on short notice.

They may wish to know that an archive of the page on 2026-08-10 at 17:47:33 is available with this paragraph here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260810174733/https://www.anthr...

I'm one of those two, as mentioned later in the post! As it stands, by mathematical standards, it would be inappropriate for us to be authors on the paper since our role was more like a highly interested referee, but we do take mathematical accountability for it. This all happened very quickly, but we will be sure to continue to polish the paper and make it ready for publication.

> Levent Alpöge and Ralph Furman, two of Anthropic’s own mathematicians, examined Claude’s work to understand the new results and how they related to the prior work mentioned above.

It's sometimes like dealing with Marvin the Robot. I had Claude tell me over and over again for 2-3 weeks that what I was trying to prove was too difficult, that I should just stop and publish what I had, then eventually I asked it the right question and it come back with the complete proof (later formalized in Lean). Especially deep in the session context it starts turning into "let's wrap it up" mode after every turn.

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…

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.

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

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?

This result is some evidence that AI will not solve RH soon. If there were any easy solution hiding in plain sight then it probably would have found it.

Solving RH likely requires AI that is substantially more creative. But we haven't even solved the creativity problem for writing let alone mathematics. I believe that transformers are a trillion dollar local optimum that we will find it very hard to escape.

Let's wait for the models to produce a good novel first.

As it stands now, the frontier models can prove theorems where the techniques exist in the literature, which it knows better than anyone who's ever lived and won't quit where a human would. There's no way to know if that's true of the Riemann Hypothesis until it's proven.

For example, even if Claude could prove the statement "100% of the zeroes lie on the critical line", that's strictly weaker than the Riemann Hypothesis, so even the best possible version of this result would fall short. (It's an asymptotic result, so it just means the percentage of counterexamples to the Riemann hypothesis goes to zero as their magnitude gets large.)

Let's extend this by asking: If an AI model can solve an extremely well known Math problem which has been open for centuries but hasn't be solved by a human mathematicians, why wouldn't that same model be able to find ways to improve it's own algorithms beyond that of the capabilities of human mathematicians / ML researchers?

The singularity is approaching.

The acknowledgements section in the paper is so bizarre. We have an LLM thanking individual humans for their contributions.

>From these companies' standpoint, I think they would choose the latter.

Ever since these things came about I've wondered why they haven't been doing this the whole time. If they've got the "do-anything" robot and can scale a billion of them, why aren't they creating a Do-Everything conglomerate that disrupts every possible industry with zero/negligible labor costs?

The only answer I've come up with is that they still need to train/siphon off each industry's current expertise by having those users interact with the current models and adjusting. If that hypothesis is correct then within a few years they'll have no need for users anymore.

If a company had a model that could cure cancer they would be incentivized to release the cure ASAP before they get decapitation striked by regulators and other AI "safetyists".

I think those specific examples, they'd release them publicly because the benefits to humanity are so clear -- however, if they found some new option-pricing model or futures market correlation, I highly doubt we'd see that...

It seems like theyd have incentive to

Yes, I think so, inevitably. For the same reason that Bitcoin mining silicon manufacturers stopped selling the latest greatest hardware to the public.

The best way to do this is to release spooky stories about how dangerous your model is and how you couldn't possibly release it without further safety shackling.

Your comment reminds me of the TV series "Persons of interest"* (with Jim Cazeviel) from 15 years ago, there are two AIs and both run private, hidden stuff. One copies itself through every router on the planet etc. and is the "evil AI" while the good guys run, in secret, a good AI (but way less powerful then the evil one).

Now the problem ATM is that OpenAI, for example, had to cut the price of two of its top 3 models by 80% to counter the chinese models: if you delay your models and a competitors takes over the market, you'll soon be out of bucks and won't be able to rent to Google and Amazon etc. the machine needed to make your new findings.

I know people don't want to hear it but: these companies are running at a loss.

And they're facing competition. Wait until a "good enough" is etched on silicon (by AMD or other) and outputs 70 000 tokens/s: the deal is going to change, once again, once those come out.

The energy, the hardware, the debt, the cost to train, the cost to run, the competition, etc. all have to be taken into account.

Sure, looks like 5% of math can be solved by 1T parameters stochastic parrot after NN trillion attempts (burned tokens). By numbers it could be less impressive than some brute force distributed chess engine.. Prove me wrong.