I've recently seen this mentioned more and more, both on HN and on reddit. It seems these output patterns are getting worse. It's not just Claude, my impression is that all of the current models have this style issue. Their writing can get borderline incomprehensible.
Is there some feedback loop or compounding happening with each model generation?
Maybe newer models are ingesting too much AI content?
If the ratio of AI generated content in training data is getting higher and higher (because the amount of AI generated content is increasing in general), maybe this is a compounding bias, poisoning the training?
That's most likely what's happening. SNR will constantly decrease as LLM content is so much quicker and cheaper to generate, which makes it more statistically significant, which will make it more "relevant" for future models. A positive feedback basically.
"Huffing their own farts" comes to mind. Instead of building Artificial Intelligence, they were building Artificial Human Centipede.
I'd never considered that the 'Gray Goo' scenario[1] or the Paperclip Maximizer, might be informational and digital rather than physical. LLMs might turn every bit of computer storage into slop (goo) and then cause us to go mad turning the Earth's resources into making more computers (AI datacenters) to hold more goo. The GrAI Goo catastrophy.
Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.
Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.
What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
They are increasingly being trained on generated tasks and even (parts) of the pre-training data is 'distilled' (e.g. Clibmix as an open-source example), so there are many ways in which the vocabulary can seep into the model.
We are seeing more of their "thinking". Lowering the refinement of the output to get closer to profitability. The nature of the LLM is that it generates huge amounts of text, then it iterates them down into a compact, hopefully accurate prose. That refinement is the really hard part and computationally costly.
The design is really impressive. Beautiful and dense, yet very understandable.
How did you come up with this particular design? It's really nice and everything fits, the colors, the layout, all of it.
Were you inspired by anything in particular? I feel like this reminds me of something, but I don't remember what exactly.
I agree with you, I really like OP's design choices, even more so amidst the flood of Claude-Generic these days. Although Claude just can't resist those little muted-toned ui-monospace small-caps...
It reminds me of Neue Grafik/Swiss Style, and Vignelli:
I asked Claude for a few original designs, then iterated a lot for the UI. It called this design "Rasterfeld", which is a word that means "field of grids", a term used in swiss design https://docs.mew.design/blog/swiss-design-style/ as @alwa said.
The 3 primary colors refer more to pop art and Bauhaus.
I'm really eager for a nice book about "design" that would document all those styles, if someone has a recommendation.
Exactly. As a lifelong linux user, I bought a Neo on release for my SO and was blown away by the quality at that price point.
I've had high-end laptops from all the big vendors, and even at the highest price tier, other vendors don't deliver such build quality. I hate how all non-Apple laptops feel. The case, the hinge, the materials, everything. If I coud reliably use linux on Apple hardware, I'd never buy another laptop brand again.
the claim is extraordinary, yet the answers cover only the mundane.
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