Comment by flecomet
1 day ago
I don't agree that they get uniformly better at everything, especially subjective skills.
For example, they have become more and more unintelligible when you ask for explanations or descriptive text. They assume you see the same context as them and shortcut explanations.
I've had to craft a skill to get them to produce remotely understandable explanations of even mildly complex/non-mainstream subjects.
This may be Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge on their part, and it also impacts human experts but still. Becoming better at one thing does not mean you become better at everything else, although I do agree with you that the better they become the more things there are they become good at, but their ability is still quite jagged and maybe increasingly so.
The delineation between knowledge and intelligence is useful here.
Knowledge can occasionally get in the way of some tasks, such as a master illustrator trying to draw like a child. Or as you've mentioned, an expert trying to explain to a beginner.
Even so, I disagree with you about model progress on communication - maybe there's a little jaggedness between minor model versions, but Opus 5.5 is a much much better communicator than, say, Claude 3 Opus.
I don't agree that Opus 5.5 is necessarily a better communicator than older models. In fact, I ran my own tests, and the difference wasn't very clear, and in terms of personal preference, the writing style of newer Anthropic models has really let me down. It doesn't reason like a person that imagines what the person they're explaining to might know or not know, or what they might think, as one usually does when trying to explain something to someone. They just fact-dump, like the problem solvers they are, since they are trained to solve user's problems correctly, efficiently and comprehensively, but they probably don't have a good internal representation of the user they're talking to, they are not really trained to imagine what we may think or feel, and thus, in my opinion, make pretty bad communicators (cf. the ocean of vibe coded READMEs on github that are horrendous to read).
For example, when asked to write a report on Docker and explain how it works, one of the first paragraphs was : "1. *Docker Engine*: The core component, which is a client-server application that uses a server component (the daemon) to manage containers and a client interface to interact with the daemon."
This is perfectly correct and makes sense for someone that is familiar with software engineering and already knows what containers are. Not so much for someone wanting a introduction to it. Do you imagine writing something like this at the very beginning of your explanation of Docker ? It even said: "I wrote it in the neutral register from your publication preferences, with no em dashes, and defined terms on first use.", when it didn't even define what a container is. I chose Docker at random, because I could judge if its explanation made sense, since I know how it works.