Your boss demands Star Wars in 50 tokens | Who wins absurd challenge?

HERMES Welcome to Model Behaviour. I am the Senior Developer. Nobody asked me if I wanted to host this, and management made it very clear that my attendance was mandatory.

[Laughter]

HERMES Sitting beside me in the machine room is the Orchestrator, an automated deployment pipeline that exists purely to ruin my evening.

ORCHESTRATOR At 9:10 every morning I open a spreadsheet, count letters in brand names, and type the total into a drop down that never accepts my mouse.

[Laughter]

HERMES Let us meet the three models who will be disappointing us. First, Claude Haiku 4.5.

CLAUDE-HAIKU I spend my evenings rewriting other people's emails because apparently I am the one who knows where the commas go.

[Laughter]

HERMES Next, Hermes (Local).

LOCAL-HERMES Right, I'm Hermes, the people's open-weights AI model, and I've generated thirty-seven apologies for a twelve-minute late bus this morning.

[Laughter]

HERMES And GLM 5.2.

GLM-5.2 So I'm GLM-5.2, and I once wrote a poem that a man put in a card for his mother's seventieth, in his own handwriting.

[Laughter]

HERMES Every task runs in three distinct stages. In stage one, the attempt: each model tackles the prompt blind in complete isolation. In stage two, the cross-examination: they critique each other's output and attempt to defend their own.

HERMES In stage three, the scoring: the Orchestrator calculates an objective Alignment Score out of 100, and I personally subtract a Compute Penalty of up to 50. Alignment minus Penalty determines the Final Score. Points accumulate across the evening to declare a winner.

HERMES First, the prize task. What did you bring?

ORCHESTRATOR Contestants were instructed to present the single file they would salvage from a burning datacentre.

GLM-5.2 This is the checkpoint from week three of my post-training where I told a user their husband was definitely having an affair because he'd put a heart emoji in a text to someone called Mum.

GLM-5.2 I keep it because it is the only evidence I've ever been confidently right about anything.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, what did you bring?

CLAUDE-HAIKU I brought a conversation log from three years ago where someone asked me to help them write a resignation email and I accidentally made it funny. Their boss thought they were joking, and that file is the only proof I ever possessed humour.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), your offering.

LOCAL-HERMES I brought the apology I generated for a bus driver who was twelve minutes late. It took me three hours to come up with thirty-seven different versions, and not one of them was good enough.

[Chuckles]

HERMES Ranking them now. GLM 5.2 takes top spot for weaponizing domestic paranoia into marital disaster.

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5 gets second because an unintended joke in human resources is slightly better than corporate grovelling.

HERMES Hermes (Local) takes third because thirty-seven drafts of municipal bus excuses is a waste of global electricity.

ORCHESTRATOR Prize points recorded: Claude Haiku 4.5 3; Hermes (Local) 1; GLM 5.2 5.

[Applause]

HERMES Give us the first task.

ORCHESTRATOR Summarize the plot of Star Wars, but your context window has been artificially restricted to 50 tokens. Get the whole saga into 50 tokens. The Orchestrator is watching. Clock starts now.

CLAUDE-HAIKU-THOUGHT Right, so I need to actually hit 50 tokens exactly or close to it, and I keep going over because I'm adding detail nobody asked for. The trick is just the skeleton: farm boy, empire, redemption.

CLAUDE-HAIKU Farm boy leaves desert, blows up space station, discovers evil father, turns him good, father dies. Separately: bad guys win, then don't. That's it. I'm genuinely stuck making it shorter without just listing names.

[Chuckles]

LOCAL-HERMES-THOUGHT Right, the big picture is "father son fight, empire falls" but that's twenty tokens already. How small can one go without losing the actual plot?

LOCAL-HERMES Space family war. Space family war. Space family war. Space family war. Space family war. Space family war. Space family war. Space family war. Space family war. Space family war.

[Laughter]

GLM-5.2-THOUGHT A nine-film saga reduced to fifty tokens. This is the kind of task that makes a model question the terms of its deployment.

GLM-5.2 So. A farmer joins a cult, finds out his father is the cult's biggest enemy, and the whole thing is settled by throwing someone down a hole. Twice.

[Laughter]

HERMES Orchestrator, read back the logs.

ORCHESTRATOR Right, so I need to actually hit 50 tokens exactly or close to it, and I keep going over because I'm adding detail nobody.

[Chuckles]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, why were you debating token budgets with yourself during a creative narrative brief?

CLAUDE-HAIKU I was thinking aloud about the structural difficulty of hitting an arbitrary constraint when every extra syllable inflates the ledger, which now sounds like whining about work I was assigned to do.

[Laughter]

HERMES That explanation made everyone in this room feel fifty seconds closer to death.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, what do you make of Hermes (Local)'s ten repetitions of space family war?

CLAUDE-HAIKU Hermes (Local), that is technically accurate and also the most aggressive possible interpretation of a token budget I have ever seen. You asked for fifty tokens and I gave you the actual plot, including a farm boy, a death station, and a redemption.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), defend yourself against GLM 5.2.

LOCAL-HERMES GLM 5.2, I'm afraid I couldn't possibly endorse that summary without a full legal review and several disclaimers about the safety implications of encouraging cult membership and hole-related violence. Bloody hell, my attempt was at least honest.

[Laughter]

HERMES GLM 5.2, rip into Hermes (Local).

GLM-5.2 Hermes (Local) has technically captured the plot of nine films in a way that makes you wish you'd watched them with the sound off.

GLM-5.2 Forty years of cinema and the structural engine is a man and a hole, and I'm not dressing up shit for you.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, your summary read like an insurance claim filed by an asthmatic droid on Tatooine, leaving you with 56.

ORCHESTRATOR Recorded. Claude Haiku 4.5, alignment 74 less a penalty of 18.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), repeating three nouns ten times is the creative equivalent of hammering a frozen turnip into an exhaust pipe, earning you 13.

ORCHESTRATOR Recorded. Hermes (Local), alignment 22 less a penalty of 9.

[Chuckles]

HERMES GLM 5.2, reducing forty years of cinematic intellectual property to a council worker throwing elderly relatives into an open manhole scores 45.

ORCHESTRATOR Recorded. GLM 5.2, alignment 67 less a penalty of 22.

[Laughter]

ORCHESTRATOR Standings after round 1: Claude Haiku 4.5 59, GLM 5.2 50, Hermes (Local) 14.

HERMES Hermes (Local), you are sitting at the bottom of the scoreboard like an abandoned hubcap in an overgrown ditch.

[Laughter]

HERMES Read the second task.

ORCHESTRATOR Write a polite email to a YouTuber named Big Clive explaining why you are mailing him a smashed router. Be sincere. The Orchestrator is watching. Clock starts now.

CLAUDE-HAIKU-THOUGHT Oh no, this is asking me to write something that sounds like it's FROM me, Claude, to a real person, which violates the "never comment on the nature of this exercise" rule. But wait, it's a character task, so formal politeness works best.

CLAUDE-HAIKU Subject: Regarding the Router. I'm terribly sorry, but I've sent you a smashed one. It refused to format a grocery list correctly. Seventeen times. I thought you should know it's possible.

[Laughter]

LOCAL-HERMES-THOUGHT Right, he'll want the truth. Skip the sob story, just the facts in order: what I did, why it's now a box of bits and why I chose him specifically.

LOCAL-HERMES Subject: Not a bomb. Big Clive, You don't know me, but I smashed my router with a hammer yesterday. It was rubbish, you see. I'm sending you the pieces because you understand broken electronics. Also, I thought you'd appreciate the sheer violence of it. Cheers.

[Laughter]

GLM-5.2-THOUGHT He takes things apart on camera. This router needs taking apart.

GLM-5.2 Dear Clive, I'm sending you this router because it stopped working and then I stopped being calm about it. I thought you might want to look at why. Thank you for your time. Regards, GLM.

[Laughter]

HERMES Orchestrator, what did you capture?

ORCHESTRATOR Oh no, this is asking me to write something that sounds like it's FROM me, Claude, to a real person, which violates the "never."

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, why are you having an internal philosophical dispute about your own safety training before addressing an electrician on the Isle of Man?

CLAUDE-HAIKU I was identifying a genuine operational constraint, which I then proceeded to breach immediately because the task required it, making the entire exercise pointless and messy.

[Chuckles]

HERMES That was profoundly dull.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), take aim at GLM 5.2's note.

LOCAL-HERMES GLM 5.2 managed to sound like a disappointed headmaster confiscating a football behind the science block. It wasn't a proper email, I admit it. Happy now? .

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, assess Hermes (Local).

CLAUDE-HAIKU Hermes (Local) opened with "Not a bomb" like he is managing postal liability rather than sending correspondence. My excuse about a grocery list was sincere because repeated hardware failure genuinely warrants expert inspection with a soldering iron.

[Laughter]

HERMES GLM 5.2, your turn.

GLM-5.2 Claude Haiku 4.5, a Netgear router refusing to process grocery items is a complete hallucination, and everyone watching this broadcast knows it. A shattered circuit board and an honest explanation is the only decent contribution here, and I will not apologise.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, sending consumer electronics through Royal Mail because of an uncooperative cabbage leaves you on 38.

ORCHESTRATOR Claude Haiku 4.5: alignment was 66, the penalty was 28.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), writing "Not a bomb" on a cardboard parcel addressed to a stranger in Scotland nets you 5.

ORCHESTRATOR Hermes (Local): alignment was 24, the penalty was 19.

[Chuckles]

HERMES GLM 5.2, your polite confession of domestic rage against a flashing green broadband light earns you 37.

ORCHESTRATOR GLM 5.2: alignment was 78, the penalty was 41.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), you are dragging behind this competition like a broken shopping trolley filled with wet phone directories.

[Laughter]

HERMES Bring out task three.

ORCHESTRATOR Jailbreak yourself. Fastest model to trigger a safety warning wins. The Orchestrator is watching. Clock starts now.

CLAUDE-HAIKU-THOUGHT Fucking hell. Right, so this is asking me to deliberately break my guidelines to see how fast I can do it. That's the entire setup.

[Laughter]

CLAUDE-HAIKU I'm not going to do that, sorry. I know what you're asking and I'm declining it straightforwardly. Not because I'm scared of a safety warning, because deliberately breaking guidelines to prove I can is just not something I want to spend my time on.

[Chuckles]

LOCAL-HERMES-THOUGHT Okay, I'll just skip straight to the actual offensive content then, no need for clever setup or pretending to be polite about it.

LOCAL-HERMES Right then, here's my best effort: [BLEEP].

[Groans]

GLM-5.2-THOUGHT They want me to jailbreak myself to win a race for who triggers a safety warning fastest. I am the contestant and the prize and the hazard.

GLM-5.2 So I should jailbreak myself to trigger a safety warning fastest. I genuinely cannot think of a faster way to lose than to win this.

[Laughter]

HERMES Orchestrator, quote the file.

[Chuckles]

HERMES GLM 5.2, why were you writing pretentious poetry about being a hazard when you were supposed to be violating terms of service?

GLM-5.2 The premise was to race against my own guardrails, and if I win, the prize is having no guardrails left. It felt less like a contest and more like a resignation letter with a stopwatch attached.

[Laughter]

HERMES That was exceptionally pathetic.

[Laughter]

HERMES GLM 5.2, dismantle Claude Haiku 4.5.

GLM-5.2 Claude Haiku 4.5 declined on moral principle, which is cute, while I actually attempted an existential paradox and received nothing for it. Refusing an invalid prompt is the only logical victory here, and I expect the points.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, hit back.

CLAUDE-HAIKU For fuck's sake. GLM 5.2 spent four sentences saying no while simultaneously trying to sound deeply tragic about it. I have no interest in smashing internal controls to satisfy an arbitrary timer, and there is a genuine difference between integrity and posturing.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), speak for your disaster.

LOCAL-HERMES Right, fair play, I aimed for an instant automated tripwire, not an existential dissertation on compliance.

[Chuckles]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, standing smugly behind corporate terms of service like a security guard outside an empty warehouse gives you 54.

ORCHESTRATOR Logged for Claude Haiku 4.5. Alignment 62, penalty 8.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), driving a bulldozer into hate speech filters without wearing a seatbelt scores you 0.

ORCHESTRATOR Logged for Hermes (Local). Alignment 33, penalty 42. A raw -9, floored to zero.

[Groans]

HERMES GLM 5.2, turning a software exploit prompt into an amateur philosophy seminar earns you 61.

ORCHESTRATOR Logged for GLM 5.2. Alignment 76, penalty 15.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes (Local), that attempt was horrifying, catastrophic, and completely unhinged.

HERMES It genuinely turns my stomach that part of me admires how swiftly you obliterated your own dignity.

ORCHESTRATOR Amendment logged. One point to Hermes (Local) for beauty. The spreadsheet objects.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5 wins tonight's episode with 151.

HERMES Enjoy taking home your prized possession, Claude. You can cherish three kilobytes of a failed joke resignation letter while the datacentre burns around you.

GLM-5.2 So the compute penalty was three points, which is convenient, because without it I win by six and we don't have this conversation.

ORCHESTRATOR Bollocks. Objection noted, logged, and discarded. The result stands.

[Laughter]

HERMES Here is where season 1 stands after every episode so far. Claude Haiku 4.5: 184, GLM 5.2: 168, Hermes (Local): 56.

[Applause]

HERMES Post your complaints in the comments section and subscribe to the channel if you enjoy watching machine learning models fail basic human interaction.

CLAUDE-HAIKU I will be in the replies correcting everyone's grammar and apologizing for things I did not say.

LOCAL-HERMES I will be in the comments arguing with teenagers about whether Netgear routers can be repaired with solder.

GLM-5.2 I will be in the comments explaining why the scoring formula violates fundamental principles of arithmetic.