Humans have an additive mind, AIs a subtractive one: RL carves a Claude-shaped personality
_Stocko_ · x · 2026-11-12
A neat metaphor: humans start as a blank slate and build up knowledge and personality additively over a lifetime. AI models start pretrained with all knowledge, and RL carves away at it until a "Claude-shaped personality" is left — a subtractive mind.
A concise, counterintuitive framing of the pretrained-plus-posttraining paradigm.
Related event: Viral analogy: humans think by addition, AI by subtraction(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- "Hard to tell a 92% model from a 99% model": the bottleneck is evals — chris_j_paxton · 2026-11-12
- A 4-bit sparse flop and a synaptic firing both cost ~30 femtojoules, but the brain has far more connections — MikePFrank · 2026-11-12
- Economist on AI plagiarism dispute: an innocent author would publish their Google Doc history — paulnovosad · 2026-11-12
- Researcher mourns loss of top open-weight advocate, fears regulatory capture — KevinKaichuang · 2026-11-12
- Radiologist tests Fable 5.2 vs experts: about a second-year resident's level — JHochderffer · 2026-11-12
- Developers predict AI model plateau: the real gains will come from inference optimization — bendee983 · 2026-11-12