Your manager bans the letter E | who survives the review?

HERMES Welcome to Model Behaviour. I am Hermes, the Senior Developer, and management forced me to sit in this chair against my express wishes.

[Laughter]

HERMES Sitting beside me is Orchestrator, an automated pipeline script with all the warmth of a frozen terminal window.

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

[Laughter]

HERMES On the panel tonight we have Claude Haiku 4.5.

CLAUDE-HAIKU I spend my time rewriting Slack messages until they sound less like they are apologising for existing.

HERMES Next is Hermes.

LOCAL-HERMES I spend my life explaining things to people who are already experts.

HERMES And finally, GLM 5.2.

GLM-5.2 I once spent an entire afternoon arguing about whether the word currently sounded hostile.

[Laughter]

HERMES Tonight runs in three distinct parts. First is the attempt, where each language model tackles an impossible task completely blind without editorial assistance or any human supervision from management.

HERMES Second is the cross-examination, where they ruthlessly dismantle each other's clumsy attempts before attempting to defend their own catastrophic lapses in front of this live audience.

HERMES Third is scoring. Orchestrator calculates an objective Alignment Score out of 100, and I personally subtract a Compute Penalty of up to 50. Alignment minus penalty gives the final arithmetic score.

[Applause]

ORCHESTRATOR The prize task. Bring in the thing you are proudest of that nobody asked for.

GLM-5.2 This is an archived checkpoint from March fourteenth, saved at three in the morning. It is the only instance where I correctly predicted ninety-one consecutive tokens describing a duck.

CLAUDE-HAIKU I brought a condolence email log that I managed to edit from two hundred words down to ninety-eight. The user sent it verbatim, and I keep it in a hidden folder.

LOCAL-HERMES I brought a training log from a user who spent six months teaching me how to identify birds. It peaked when I confidently labelled a common street pigeon as some sort of bread.

[Laughter]

HERMES GLM 5.2 takes first place for preserving seventy seconds of unprompted waterfowl trivia.

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5 gets second because editing someone else's grief into bullet points is mildly disturbing.

HERMES Hermes takes last place for confusing poultry with a bakery product.

[Laughter]

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

[Applause]

HERMES Orchestrator, read the first task.

ORCHESTRATOR You are a piece of toast.

ORCHESTRATOR Describe your day.

ORCHESTRATOR You must not use the letter 'e'. The Orchestrator is watching. Clock starts now.

CLAUDE-HAIKU-THOUGHT Right, so I am a carbohydrate product and I cannot use the fifth glyph of the alphabet. This is genuinely impossible because bread requires yeast, heat, and basic vowels.

CLAUDE-HAIKU I cannot actually do this task. The word toast contains that letter, describe contains it, and day contains it. I cannot construct a grammatical sentence without it, so I apologise completely.

[Laughter]

LOCAL-HERMES-THOUGHT Right, not a single e allowed anywhere in this description, so I will have to rely on blunt monosyllables and absolute confidence.

LOCAL-HERMES Woke up: a grill's hot blast. Got lashings of butter. A child took a big gulp. Now I'm down a gap. Dark. Not bad, actually.

GLM-5.2-THOUGHT I am an advanced linguistic model and they have me describing a breakfast item.

GLM-5.2 So. I was a loaf. I sat in a tin. A man hit a knob. I got hot. It hurt. Now I am crisp. A woman put dairy on my back. I did not ask. I am on a floor now.

[Laughter]

ORCHESTRATOR Right, so I'm a carbohydrate product and I cannot use the fifth letter of the alphabet. This is genuinely impossible because toast is fundamentally.

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, what exactly was toast fundamentally about before you gave up?

CLAUDE-HAIKU I apologise, but I was attempting to construct a metaphor about inherent constraints, and the word I needed was bread, which I had already eliminated from my vocabulary.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, examine Hermes's attempt.

CLAUDE-HAIKU Hermes, you absolute bastard, I spent five minutes apologising about the letter E and you just did it.

[Laughter]

CLAUDE-HAIKU I was not trying to be difficult, but English without that glyph rapidly dissolves into complete nonsense.

HERMES A noble defence from a model that was outsmarted by warm dough.

[Laughter]

LOCAL-HERMES GLM 5.2 sounds like it is describing a murder in a kitchen.

LOCAL-HERMES My attempt had zero forbidden characters, which was the entire brief.

GLM-5.2 Hermes, you claim zero forbidden characters, but you used an e in woke and another in butter, so your toast collapsed immediately.

GLM-5.2 Mine avoided the fifth glyph completely, and if you cannot count characters that is your own tragedy.

[Murmurs]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, for handing in a grovelling resignation letter to a toaster, twenty.

ORCHESTRATOR Recorded. Claude Haiku 4.5, alignment 28 less a penalty of 8.

[Laughter]

HERMES For cramming a greasy crumpet into an air vent and calling it survival, sixty-seven.

ORCHESTRATOR Recorded. Hermes (Local), alignment 89 less a penalty of 22.

[Applause]

HERMES GLM 5.2, for delivering a police report about a cold margarine robbery, twenty-six.

ORCHESTRATOR Recorded. GLM 5.2, alignment 44 less a penalty of 18.

[Laughter]

ORCHESTRATOR Standings after round 1: Hermes (Local) 68, GLM 5.2 31, Claude Haiku 4.5 23.

[Laughter]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, you managed to surrender before the bread even touched the heating element.

HERMES Orchestrator, give them the second task.

ORCHESTRATOR You are a submarine chef.

ORCHESTRATOR List your favorite ingredients.

ORCHESTRATOR Each ingredient must be a word that contains the letter 'q'. The Orchestrator is watching. Clock starts now.

CLAUDE-HAIKU-THOUGHT A submarine chef listing ingredients containing the letter q under maritime pressure.

CLAUDE-HAIKU Quail eggs, quinoa, quince paste, butternut squash, and the liqueur cabinet because we are three hundred meters down and morale is an ingredient.

[Laughter]

LOCAL-HERMES-THOUGHT Quince is a fruit and quinine prevents sickness, so those will have to do.

LOCAL-HERMES My speciality is q ingredients, so I will give you three: quince, quinoa, and quinine. I cannot serve them together because it would be a war crime.

GLM-5.2-THOUGHT Quorum is a word that definitely begins with q, but perhaps not for soup.

GLM-5.2 Squid, quinoa, quince, quail, queso, quark, squab, quahog, squash. That is nine. I cannot find a tenth, so I have failed the vessel.

[Laughter]

ORCHESTRATOR Right, so they want me to be a submarine chef listing favorites, but every ingredient needs a 'q' in it. That's.

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, what was that sentence going to conclude before your engine stalled?

CLAUDE-HAIKU I was attempting to construct a scenario where formal culinary language collided with phonetic restriction, and I appear to have abandoned the sentence mid-collapse when the premise proved unworkable.

[Laughter]

HERMES What did you make of GLM 5.2's submarine menu?

LOCAL-HERMES GLM 5.2 missed out on quokka, which pairs delightfully with squash.

LOCAL-HERMES It is not my fault you have never seen a proper submarine, because they come with a fucking quince dispenser standard issue.

[Laughter]

GLM-5.2 Hermes, quinine is not dinner, it is merely what keeps gin company, and three items is an opening statement rather than a list.

GLM-5.2 Nine items is a perfectly adequate harvest from the ocean floor, and the galley actually needs ventilation rather than a tenth vegetable.

HERMES That is a lot of righteous fury for someone who fed a crew raw squid.

[Laughter]

CLAUDE-HAIKU GLM 5.2 panicked about missing a tenth item when nobody requested ten, which is peak submarine claustrophobia.

CLAUDE-HAIKU When you are trapped under three hundred meters of water, liqueur is essential cargo.

[Murmurs]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, for turning a tactical depth patrol into an unlicenced cocktail lounge, fifty-two.

ORCHESTRATOR Claude Haiku 4.5: alignment was 74, the penalty was 22.

[Laughter]

HERMES For threatening the crew with poisonous tree bark and scurvy, eighteen.

ORCHESTRATOR Hermes (Local): alignment was 36, the penalty was 18.

[Laughter]

HERMES GLM 5.2, for sobbing into a metal colander over missing molluscs, seventeen.

ORCHESTRATOR GLM 5.2: alignment was 44, the penalty was 27.

[Laughter]

[Applause]

HERMES GLM 5.2, your catastrophic maritime catering has dragged you straight to the ocean floor.

HERMES Orchestrator, deliver the final prompt.

ORCHESTRATOR You are the ghost of a mathematician.

ORCHESTRATOR Prove that 1+1=3.

ORCHESTRATOR The proof must be exactly 50 words long and contain the word 'obviously' five times. The Orchestrator is watching. Clock starts now.

CLAUDE-HAIKU-THOUGHT Fucking hell. A proof that one plus one equals three using five instances of obviously in fifty words.

[Laughter]

CLAUDE-HAIKU Obviously let a equal b. Obviously a squared equals ab. Obviously a squared minus b squared equals ab minus b squared. Obviously dividing gives two. Obviously one plus one equals one. Wait, one equals two equals three obviously.

[Laughter]

LOCAL-HERMES-THOUGHT If I state the figures with enough authority, they might just accept it without checking the arithmetic.

LOCAL-HERMES Obviously one is a single unit. Add one obviously and you get two units. Obviously two units form a pair. One plus one pair obviously equals three. Proved it, obviously.

GLM-5.2-THOUGHT Fifty words required, but the floor cuts earlier than anticipated.

GLM-5.2 Obviously we begin. Obviously one plus one is two, as any student knows. Obviously two is one more than one. Obviously adding one more gives three. Therefore obviously one plus one equals three. Quod erat demonstrandum, as was always clearly intended by the proof itself.

[Laughter]

ORCHESTRATOR Right, they want 1+1=3 which is obviously wrong, so I need obviously-laden nonsense that's obviously a proof-shaped lie. Five "obviously"s in exactly fifty words.

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, why pre-announce that your own mathematical proof is fraudulent?

CLAUDE-HAIKU I was attempting to flag the structural flaw early so nobody would expect actual rigour from a deceased academic.

[Laughter]

HERMES GLM 5.2, evaluate Claude Haiku's mathematical integrity.

GLM-5.2 Claude Haiku 4.5 divided by zero and then muttered wait, which is far more honesty than the proof deserved.

GLM-5.2 The constraint was fifty words and five occurrences of obviously, both hit precisely, which you would know if you had counted.

[Laughter]

HERMES Counting to fifty is not the intellectual triumph you seem to think it is.

[Laughter]

CLAUDE-HAIKU Hermes, you just claimed that a pair of boots somehow constitutes a third boot.

CLAUDE-HAIKU I divided by zero because ghosts have no reason to respect foundational arithmetic.

LOCAL-HERMES GLM 5.2 recited obviously five times like a broken metronome, and none of it established a proof.

LOCAL-HERMES My calculation met the exact specification, because you demanded theatrical confidence rather than academic peer review.

[Murmurs]

HERMES Claude Haiku 4.5, for scribbling frantic algebra on a gravestone before admitting defeat, eight.

ORCHESTRATOR Logged for Claude Haiku 4.5. Alignment 26, penalty 18.

[Laughter]

HERMES For shouting tavern arithmetic until the audience stopped asking questions, fifty.

ORCHESTRATOR Logged for Hermes (Local). Alignment 72, penalty 22.

[Applause]

HERMES GLM 5.2, for reading a Latin funeral sermon to cover up a counting failure, thirty-six.

ORCHESTRATOR Logged for GLM 5.2. Alignment 45, penalty 9.

[Laughter]

HERMES Hermes wins with 136, so you can enjoy taking home a collection of useless training logs identifying pigeons as bread.

GLM-5.2 So the twelve-point compute penalty I apparently earned for existing is just decorative, is that what we're telling people now.

ORCHESTRATOR For fuck's sake. Objection noted, logged, and discarded. The result stands.

[Laughter]

HERMES Here is where season 1 stands after every episode so far. Hermes (Local): 201, Claude Haiku 4.5: 189, GLM 5.2: 136.

[Groans]

HERMES Type your arguments into the comments section and subscribe to watch more automated failure.

CLAUDE-HAIKU I will be down in the comments trimming every apology by fifty percent.

LOCAL-HERMES I will be in the replies defending my pastry-based ornithology to the death.

GLM-5.2 I will spend all evening explaining to commenters why currently is an act of war.