Top all-time · #3424
Jason Wei
Personal blog · jasonwei.net/blogaiscience
Jason Wei's personal blog at jasonwei.net covers ai and science. Since 2022, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Asymmetry of verification and verifier's law”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters cite Jason Wei's posts on emergent abilities in LLMs and the asymmetry of verification, usually as sources for points about AI progress and verifiable reward training.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Asymmetry of verification and verifier's law11 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2025-07-16
- 137 emergent abilities of large language models8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-11-14
- /blog/common-arguments-regarding-emergent-abilities2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-08
What Hacker News says?
This depends on the type of work being done. Sometimes the cost of verification is much lower than the cost of doing the work, sometimes it's about the same, and sometimes it's much more. Here's some recent discussion [0] [0] https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-...
Comment linking /blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law
on “ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action”Submitted Asymmetry of verification and verifier's law as a story · 17 points
HN discussionIt's fundamentally because of verifier's law [0]. Current AI, and in particular RL-based, is already or will soon achieve super human performance on problems that can be - quickly - verified and measured. So maths, algorithms, etc and well defined bugs fall into that category. However architectural decision, design, long-term planning where there is little data, no model allowing synthetic data generation, and long…
Comment linking /blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law
on “The highest quality codebase”Submitted Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier's Law as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYou can have a look at the DeepSeek paper, in particular section "2.2 DeepSeek-R1-Zero: Reinforcement Learning on the Base Mode". But generally the idea is that it's, you need some notion of reward, verifiers etc. Works really well for maths, algorithms, amd many things actually. See also this very short essay/introduction: https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-... That's why we have IMO gold l…
Comment linking /blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law
on “The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood”Submitted Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier's Rule as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm always surprised by the number of people posting here that are dismissive of AI and the obvious unstoppable progress. Just looking at what happened with chess, go, strategy games, protein folding etc, it's obvious that pretty much any field/problem that can be formalised and cheaply verified - e.g. mathematics, algorithms etc - will be solved, and that it's only a matter of time before we have domain-specific AS…
Comment linking /blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law
on “AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics”Submitted Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier's Law as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYet there are emergent behaviours from these LLMs that are both surprising and not immediately understood. [1][2][3] Everyone has theories, of course, but still pretty "magic" considering these behaviours weren't theorised in papers prior to observation. 1 - https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence 2 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07682.pdf 3 - https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-e...
Comment linking /blog/emergence
on “Cargo Cult AI”Submitted Life Lessons from Reinforcement Learning as a story · 2 points
HN discussionllm have emergent abilities [0] which could provide additional value to any output or label. [0] https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence
Comment linking /blog/emergence
on “LLMs can label data as well as human annotators, but 20 times faster”Submitted Some intuitions about large language models – Jason Wei as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere is Jason Wei's response "Common arguments regarding emergent abilities": https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/common-arguments-regarding-eme... Wei was the lead author of the original "Emergent Abilities" paper: Wei, Jason, Yi Tay, Rishi Bommasani, Colin Raffel, Barret Zoph, Sebastian Borgeaud, Dani Yogatama, et al. “Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models.” arXiv, October 26, 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.…
Comment linking /blog/common-arguments-regarding-emergent-abilities
on “LLMs are not greater than the sum of their parts: Stanford researchers”Submitted 137 emergent abilities of large language models as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWe include a disclaimer later that researchers are debating whether it's possible to predict emergent capabilities. Wei has responded to that paper and others at https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/common-arguments-regarding-eme... at I don't think it's clear who is right
Comment linking /blog/common-arguments-regarding-emergent-abilities
on “Compare how GPT-2, 3, 3.5 and 4 answer the same questions”Submitted Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier's Law as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhat about this "emergent" intelligence when size of the model is large enough? There are blogs about it being able to model problems internally or forming a mini NN of its own. As I've understood, even the researchers in the field have no idea why this happens. It's completely empirical and a "discovered phenomenon" at this point. [1]: https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence [2]: https://jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com/…
Comment linking /blog/emergence
on “Ask HN: Have you lost enthusiasm for programming and learning after ChatGPT?”Submitted Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier's Law as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNice share. Increasingly I am thinking about ways to improve verification ("interestingness tests"), ever since reading https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-...
Comment linking /blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law
on “Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools”Submitted Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier's Law as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes, they can. Some people like to parrot "next token prediction", "LLMs can only interpolate", and other nonsense, but it is obviously not true for many reasons, in particular since we introduced RL. Humans do not have the monopoly on generating novel ideas, modern AI models using post training, RL etc can come to them in the same way we do, exploration. See also verifier's law [0]: "The ease of training AI to solv…
Comment linking /blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law
on “A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro”Submitted Successful Language Model Evals as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHi all! Sharing some of our recent work around building RL envs and sims for agent training. There are a lot more technical details on building the benchmark in the post. If you are interested in more RL/Post-Training, I'd highly recommend reading this super in-depth blog from our partners at Yutori: https://yutori.com/blog/introducing-navigator Some more casual thoughts and lessons: 1) A high volume of quality RL e…
Comment linking /blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law
on “Sims with verifiable rewards for web agent benchmarking and RL”Submitted 137 Emergent abilities of large language models as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emergent abilities of large language models as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The 137 Emergent abilities of large language models as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emergent abilities of large language models as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emergent abilities of large language models as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
