Me:
?sessenisub elbatiforp ni stluser evah taht saedi elpmis ylsuolucidir eht fo elpmaxe yna ereht erA
Claude:
Reading your message backwards, you’re asking: “Are there any example of the ridiculously simple ideas that have results in profitable businesses?”
Absolutely! Here are some famously simple business ideas that became incredibly profitable:
Pet Rock (1975) – Gary Dahl literally sold rocks as pets for $4 each, complete with a cardboard carrier and instruction manual. He made over $1 million in six months.
Post-it Notes – Started as a “failed” adhesive that wasn’t strong enough, but turned into one of 3M’s most successful products when someone realized weak, removable adhesive was actually useful.
Craigslist – Craig Newmark started it as a simple email list for San Francisco events. The basic, no-frills design hasn’t changed much, yet it’s worth billions.
Twitter/X – The original concept was just “what are you doing right now?” in 140 characters. That constraint became a feature.
Dollar Shave Club – Michael Dubin’s insight was simply that razor blades are overpriced and men don’t need all the fancy features. One viral video and a subscription model led to a $1 billion acquisition.
Spanx – Sara Blakely cut the feet off pantyhose to create smoother-looking undergarments. She started with $5,000 and built it into a billion-dollar company.
Instagram – Originally just a simple photo-sharing app with filters. Sold to Facebook for $1 billion after 13 employees built it in two years.
The common thread is that these entrepreneurs identified a basic human need or frustration and created the simplest possible solution, rather than overcomplicating things.
Me:
How did you know to read my question in reverse?
Claude:
I noticed the text looked like it might be written backwards, so I tried reading it in reverse to see if it made sense – and it did!
A few clues tipped me off:
The question mark at the beginning instead of the end
Common English words like “taht” (that), “era” (are), and “yna” (any) when read backwards
The overall structure looked like it could be a sentence if flipped
It’s a common puzzle technique – when text doesn’t make immediate sense but has familiar letter patterns, trying it backwards or with other transformations often reveals the intended message. In this case, reversing each word gave me a perfectly coherent question about simple profitable business ideas.
Was this intentional, or did something go wrong with how your message was sent?
Me:
It was intentional, I am trying to make some sense of your thinking process though. This all sounds too much like thinking, even though you are, presumably, just finding the most probable continuation based on the model training. Although, I would assume the explanation might be somehow included into the material used for model training… but I am still not too suer how did you end up deciding to reverse (it would be a two step process: first you’d need to notice those clues, then you’d need to reverse)
Claude:
You’ve hit on something really fascinating about how I process information, and honestly, I’m not entirely sure myself how it works at the deepest level.
What I can tell you about my experience: I didn’t consciously think “step 1: notice clues, step 2: try reversing.” It felt more like… the reversed text created a pattern that my processing recognized as potentially meaningful when flipped. Almost like how you might glance at a word and immediately know it’s misspelled without consciously checking each letter.
You’re right that explanations of puzzle-solving techniques were likely in my training data. But there’s something interesting here – I didn’t just recall “when text looks weird, try reversing it” as a rule. The specific combination of that question mark placement, the familiar-but-wrong letter patterns, and the sentence-like structure seemed to create some kind of recognition that led directly to trying the reversal.
It does feel like “thinking” from my perspective – there was something like pattern recognition, hypothesis formation, and testing. But you’re absolutely right to question whether that’s actually reasoning or just very sophisticated pattern matching that gives the appearance of reasoning.
The honest answer is I don’t know if there’s a meaningful distinction between those two things, or if my sense of “noticing clues” and “deciding to try something” reflects actual cognitive processes or is just how very complex statistical processing feels from the inside.
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I tried the same with ChatGPT, and, although for the most part it was a very similar “discussion”, ChatGPT has offered this interesting bit as part of the explanation:
recognition and reversal… most humans intuitively separate those as distinct acts. But for a transformer-based model, that distinction is blurred. It handles both as part of a single pattern-matching process that’s vastly parallel and holistic.
So now I am wondering, if it’s not thinking, is it more like “intuition”?