7 ms·
A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validat
by Kosturdistan 3mo ago
A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and I wrote the post at the link.
- yorwba 3mo agoThen why is there no link to the actual write-up?
- GavinMcG 3mo agoPresumably because it hasn’t yet been published?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- kelseyfrog 3mo agoYou can use Claude, like the author, to reproduce the result.
- justin_dash 3mo agoUnless if it was done by Fable!
- kelseyfrog 3mo agoThe 'major insight' described in the article predates Fable's release by two week four days. It would be a complicated timeline.
- atrus 3mo agosomehow I suspect it was a bit more involved than: Claude, please solve Linear A.
- smsm42 3mo agoYou also have to add "make no mistakes"!
- fragmede 3mo agoA little bit more. If you ask ChatGPT to "solve linear a" it thinks you mean linear algebra. If you specify that it's the Minoan translation problem, you get a table similar to the one that we get a glimpse of in the without access to the paper, we can't say how much more work the paper has than my gist. https://gist.github.com/fragmede/bbf277d36a2398065f109484f3473684 https://gist.github.com/fragmede/bbf277d36a2398065f109484f34...
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoYou are correct!
- _verandaguy 3mo agoThis isn't really a reasonable approach, is it? The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
- ben_w 3mo ago> even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility. If you had the other things, being "stochastic" is not even remotely a show-stopper. Stochastic processes abound and are the reason the mathematics of statistics was developed in the first place, ultimately allowing us to create such things as LLMs. When all the relevant steps gets published, I absolutely expect a lot of people to (attempt to) reproduce this work even though LLMs are stochastic.
- _verandaguy 3mo agoMy issue with this is that it's a form of "soft" reproducibility, where it'll work for many (maybe even most!) people, but that depends on the way the original prompt was formulated (read on) and the state of the random noise in the system. On the prompt formulation; prompts with very similar formulations (in terms of both semantics, hamming distance, or both) can lead to _wildly divergent_ outputs in my experience. It's not rigourous, and when that divergence happens, it's extremely difficult (arguably impossible, by nature of the architecture of transformers) to identify why the divergence happened and where.
- fragmede 3mo agoSure it is. We're humans, not robots (well, I think I am, and I presume you are as well, but for all we know, we could be living in a simulation), so if the non-deterministic system decides to generate code that calls the variable foo one day and bar the next, as long as the code still does what's being asked of it, why do I care that the non deterministic system chose to call the variable something different when run on Tuesday? There's the computer science definition of determinism and the engineering result of "does it work", which are at odds. It's like the halting problem. We haven't solved the computer science definition of the halting problem, but give some C code with a loop that won't terminate to Claude, and it'll call that out as not halting.
- m0llusk 3mo agoIt seems this is still extremely early in the process. There is an apparent finding that was shared. Evidence which would be the basis for a paper is "being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge". So they are trying to do the right thing by talking about what they believe they have done but holding off publication and serious claims until later. The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here.
- sillysaurusx 3mo ago> The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here. Could you rephrase this or explain it more thoroughly? I don’t follow. What does it mean to categorize a written form by systems built with Claude?
- tyingq 3mo agoThe same pattern/tech is generic enough that it might be able to solve other unrelated, and so-far undecipherable, written languages.
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoThe only write-up at the moment is my blog post, hopefully that changes in the coming weeks.
- Sniffnoy 3mo agoThe blog post mentions a draft of a manuscript though. I was expecting something like a preprint. He's not willing to post that draft yet?
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoI have seen and read his draft article, he's not comfortable sharing it publicly yet since it's being reviewed by experts.
- ahknight 3mo agoBut the Internet nerds wish to blindly judge something they know nothing about so they can feel better with the assumption that they could have done better somehow. How will they be appeased if the document they will say they have read and understood (without having done either) is not available to point at? How, I ask?!
- qustio 3mo agoIt's entirely reasonable to ask for the underlying research in response to a blog post hyping up an unproven claim in an area notoriously full of amateurs making the same claim that historically fail to stand up to scrutiny. Particularly when the only source is a friend of the author, posting on a blog named "AI Clambake" about "A weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks who want to stay on top of the AI mayhem" and not a publication with any credibility in linguistics. None of that means it can't be true, but some basic skepticism is warranted here. Otherwise we end up in a situation like the LK99 room temperature superconductor where a lot of HN commenters were also upset at the cynical "downers" who just couldn't root for a good thing/progress.
- grey-area 3mo agoAmazing work and refreshing to see a well written and cogent post to summarise it. Would love to hear more about how he used Claude to help solve the puzzle.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- kubb 3mo agoLet's wait until it's been verified.
- mikestorrent 3mo agoYou're absolutely right! We've opened a ticket with the Linear A folks, hopefully they'll get back to us soon with an update as to whether we've got it correct or not. Hang tight!
- saagarjha 3mo agoA Linear ticket, hopefully
- kridsdale1 3mo agoThis comment sure is load bearing.
- mikestorrent 3mo agoIt's the veritable smoking gun
- make3 3mo agoI'd like to push back
- TeMPOraL 3mo agoRegardless, we should stand ready, loaded for bear.
- bawolff 3mo agoHow does an expert even verify something like this?
- sigbottle 3mo agoI mean it's not like anyone could objectively go back in time and query ancient civilizations for what they meant, but presumably it means the verification heuristics, they have currently, pragmatic success, and expert solidarity means that it is "verified"
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dwroberts 3mo agoYou know him socially but is there a reason you’re writing this rather than him? It looks like he has his own web presence. Cynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed
- Conscat 3mo agoIsn't it customary for the author of a post shared on HN to leave a comment on the thread?
- dwroberts 3mo agoI’m not referring to the parent comment: The post is not written by the author of the claimed breakthrough.
- iwontberude 3mo agoWhat thunder? Claude did the work and used a human to interface with experience and causality better.
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoClaude helped, it did not do the work. It would have taken Tom more time to crack on his own, and it would have been harder, but the key insights were Tom's not Claude's.
- ben_w 3mo agoThe thunder is as per the headline. Assuming it passes review. One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit.
- iwontberude 3mo agoI exist in both camps. Claude can’t launder human achievement into a different person. Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.
- canjobear 3mo ago> Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge What does this mean? Like he e-mailed it to some people at Rutgers and Cambridge? Or it's under some kind of non-anonymous peer review?