4 ms·

The free market proposition is that competition (especially with Chinese labs and grok) means that Anthropic is welcome to do that. They're even welcome to ille

by fragmede 10mo ago

The free market proposition is that competition (especially with Chinese labs and grok) means that Anthropic is welcome to do that. They're even welcome to illegally collude with OpenAi such that ChatGPT is similarly gimped. But switching costs are pretty low. If it turns out I can one shot an issue with Qwen or Deepseek or Kimi thinking, Anthropic loses not just my monthly subscription, but everyone else's I show that too. So no, I think that's some grade A conspiracy theory nonsense you've got there.

thunderfork 10mo ago
As a rational consumer, how would you distinguish between some intentional "keep pulling the slot machine" failure rate and the intrinsic failure rate? I feel like saying "the market will fix the incentives" handwaves away the lack of information on internals. After all, look at the market response to Google making their search less reliable - sure, an invested nerd might try Kagi, but Google's still the market leader by a long shot. In a market for lemons, good luck finding a lime.
- krupan 10mo ago
  FWIW, kagi is better than Google
  - direwolf20 10mo ago
    yes, that was their point. Everyone uses Google anyway.
coffeefirst 10mo ago
It’s not that crazy. It could even happen by accident in pursuit of another unrelated goal. And if it did, a decent chunk of the tech industry would call it “revealed preference” because usage went up.
- hnuser123456 10mo ago
  LLMs became sycophantic and effusive because those responses were rated higher during RLHF, until it became newsworthy how obviously eager-to-please they got, so yes, being highly factually correct and "intelligent" was already not the only priority.
jrflowers 10mo ago
This is a good point. For example if you have access to a bunch of slot machines, one of them is guaranteed to hit the jackpot. Since switching from one slot machine to another is easy, it is trivial to go from machine to machine until you hit the big bucks. That is why casinos have such large selections of them (for our benefit).
- krupan 10mo ago
  "for our benefit" lol! This is the best description of how we are all interacting with LLMs now. It's not working? Fire up more "agents" ala gas town or whatever
  - direwolf20 10mo ago
    gas is the transaction fees in Ethereum. It's a fitting name.
- robotmaxtron 10mo ago
  last time I was at a casino I checked to see what company built the machines, imagine my surprise that it was (by my observation) a single vendor.
daxfohl 10mo ago
To be clear I don't think that's what they're doing intentionally. Especially on a subscription basis, they'd rather me maximize my value per token, or just not use them. Lulling users into using tokens unproductively is the worst possible option. The way agents work right now though just sometimes feels that way; they don't have a good way of saying "You're probably going to have to figure this one out yourself".
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
bandrami 10mo ago
> But switching costs are pretty low Switching costs are currently low. Once you're committed to the workflow the providers will switch to prepaying for a year's worth of tokens.
zelphirkalt 10mo ago
And we all know the market always gives us the best quality product ...

thunderfork 10mo ago

As a rational consumer, how would you distinguish between some intentional "keep pulling the slot machine" failure rate and the intrinsic failure rate? I feel like saying "the market will fix the incentives" handwaves away the lack of information on internals. After all, look at the market response to Google making their search less reliable - sure, an invested nerd might try Kagi, but Google's still the market leader by a long shot. In a market for lemons, good luck finding a lime.

krupan 10mo ago
FWIW, kagi is better than Google
- direwolf20 10mo ago
  yes, that was their point. Everyone uses Google anyway.

coffeefirst 10mo ago

It’s not that crazy. It could even happen by accident in pursuit of another unrelated goal. And if it did, a decent chunk of the tech industry would call it “revealed preference” because usage went up.

hnuser123456 10mo ago
LLMs became sycophantic and effusive because those responses were rated higher during RLHF, until it became newsworthy how obviously eager-to-please they got, so yes, being highly factually correct and "intelligent" was already not the only priority.

jrflowers 10mo ago

This is a good point. For example if you have access to a bunch of slot machines, one of them is guaranteed to hit the jackpot. Since switching from one slot machine to another is easy, it is trivial to go from machine to machine until you hit the big bucks. That is why casinos have such large selections of them (for our benefit).

krupan 10mo ago
"for our benefit" lol! This is the best description of how we are all interacting with LLMs now. It's not working? Fire up more "agents" ala gas town or whatever
- direwolf20 10mo ago
  gas is the transaction fees in Ethereum. It's a fitting name.
robotmaxtron 10mo ago
last time I was at a casino I checked to see what company built the machines, imagine my surprise that it was (by my observation) a single vendor.

daxfohl 10mo ago

To be clear I don't think that's what they're doing intentionally. Especially on a subscription basis, they'd rather me maximize my value per token, or just not use them. Lulling users into using tokens unproductively is the worst possible option. The way agents work right now though just sometimes feels that way; they don't have a good way of saying "You're probably going to have to figure this one out yourself".

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

bandrami 10mo ago

> But switching costs are pretty low Switching costs are currently low. Once you're committed to the workflow the providers will switch to prepaying for a year's worth of tokens.

zelphirkalt 10mo ago

And we all know the market always gives us the best quality product ...