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Nguyen: Claude Refused Setting Alarms After Realizing It Lacked a Body

Karina Nguyen · OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen · Feb 9, 2025 · at 7:05

Karina Nguyen, former Anthropic post-training researcher now at OpenAI, describes training edge cases encountered during Claude 3 development.

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“One of the things that I've learned early days at Anthropic was, like, we've discovered, especially with, like, cloud three training, when you taught the model some of the self-knowledge of, like, hey, like, you actually don't have a physical body to operate, like, in the physical world. But then at the same time, we had data that kind of taught the model some of the function calls, which is, like, this is how you set the alarm. And so the model would get, like, extremely confused about, like, whether it can set an alarm, but it doesn't have a body in the physical world.”

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