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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

(j0nah.com)
549 points thecr0w | 3 comments | 07 Dec 25 17:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Wowfunhappy ◴[07 Dec 25 17:57 UTC] No.46183598[source]▶
Claude is not very good at using screenshots. The model may technically be multi-modal, but its strength is clearly in reading text. I'm not surprised it failed here.
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fnordpiglet ◴[07 Dec 25 18:57 UTC] No.46184084[source]▶
Especially since it decomposes the image into a semantic vector space rather than the actual grid of pixels. Once the image is transformed into patch embeddings all sense of pixels is entirely destroyed. The author demonstrates a profound lack of understanding for how multimodal LLMs function that a simple query of one would elucidate immediately.

The right way to handle this is not to build it grids and whatnot, which all get blown away by the embedding encoding but to instruct it to build image processing tools of its own and to mandate their use in constructing the coordinates required and computing the eccentricity of the pattern etc in code and language space. Doing it this way you can even get it to write assertive tests comparing the original layout to the final among various image processing metrics. This would assuredly work better, take far less time, be more stable on iteration, and fits neatly into how a multimodal agentic programming tool actually functions.

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1. mcbuilder ◴[07 Dec 25 20:14 UTC] No.46184725[source]▶
Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking. LLMs don't have precise geometrical reasoning from images. Having an intuition of how the models work is actually.a defining skill in "prompt engineering"
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2. thecr0w ◴[07 Dec 25 23:40 UTC] No.46186574[source]▶
Yeah, still trying to build my intuition. Experiments/investigations like this help me. Any other blogs or experiments you'd suggest?
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3. fnordpiglet ◴[08 Dec 25 01:35 UTC] No.46187334[source]▶
Asking your favorite LLM actually helps a lot. They generally are well trained on LLM papers unsurprisingly. In this case though it’s important to realize the LLM is incapable of seeing or hearing or reading. Everything has to be transformed into a vector space. Images are generally cut into patches (like 16x16) which are themselves transformed by several neural networks to convert them into a semantic space represented by the models parameters.

But this isn’t hugely different than your vision. You don’t see the pixel grid either. You have to use tools to measure things. You have the ability over time to iteratively interact with the image by perhaps counting grid lines but the LLM does not - it’s a one shot inference against this highly transformed image. They’ve gotten better at complex visual tasks including types of counting, but it’s not able to examine the image in any analytical way or even in its original representation. It’s just not possible.

It can however make tools that can. It’s very good at working with PIL and other image processing libraries or even writing image processing code de novo, and then using those to ground itself. Likewise it can not do math, but it can write a calculator that can do highly complex mathematics on its behalf.