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The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time

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• CGMthrowaway 8mo ago
  > The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior, no matter the optimization target. This applies to Claude
  • ctoth 8mo ago
    Sometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop. Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not. Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a damn thing. Should I stop fishing? Obviously no. So what's the difference? What is the precise mechanism here that you're pointing at? Because sometimes life is disappointing is a reason to do nothing. And yet.
    • outofpaper 8mo ago
      ??? I'm pretty sure you know what the differences are. Go touch grass and tell me it's the same as looking at a plant on a screen. Dealing with organic and natural systems will, most of the time, have a variable reward. The real issue comes from systems and services designed to only be accessible through intermittent variable rewards. Oh, and don't confuse Claude's artifacts working most of the time with them actually optimizing to be that way. They're optimizing to ensure token usage. I.E. LLMs have been fine-tuned to default to verbose responses. They are impressive to less experienced developers, often easier to detect certain types of errors (eg. Improper typing), and will make you use more tokens.
      • squeaky-clean 8mo ago
        So gambling is fine as long as I'm doing it outside. Poker in a casino? Bad. Poker in a foresty meadow, good. Got it.
        • mikkupikku 8mo ago
          Basically true tbqh. Poker is maybe the one exception, but you're almost always better off gambling "in the wild" e.g. poker night with your buds instead of playing slots or anything else where "the house" is always winning in the long run. Are your losses still circulating in your local community, or have they been siphoned off by shareholders on the other side of the world? Gambling with friends is just swapping money back and forth, but going to a casino might as well be lighting the money on fire.
    • roblh 8mo ago
      It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is. Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough that you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. That's about as close to a slot machine as I can imagine. Slot rewards are designed to keep you interested as long as possible, on the premise that you _might_ get what you want, the jackpot, if you play long enough. Anthropic's game isn't limited to a single spin either. The small wins (small prompts with well defined answers) are support for the big losses (trying to one shot a whole production grade program).
  • pixl97 8mo ago
    >Intermittent variable rewards, So you're saying businesses shouldn't hire people either?
  • bonoboTP 8mo ago
    And that's only bad if it's illusory or fake. This reaction evolved because it's adaptive. In slot machines the brain is tricked to believe there is some strategy or method to crack and the reward signals make the addict feel there is some kind of progress being made in return to some kind of effort. The variability in eg soccer kicks or basketball throws is also there but clearly there is a skill element and a potential for progress. Same with many other activities. Coding with LLMs is not so different. There are clearly ways you can do it better and it's not pure randomness.
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  • Aurornis 8mo ago
    > Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior, no matter the optimization target. This is an incorrect understanding of intermittent variable reward research. Claims that it "will induce compulsive behavior" are not consistent with the research. Most rewards in life are variable and intermittent and people aren't out there developing compulsive behavior for everything that fits that description. There are many counter-examples, such as job searching: It's clearly an intermittent variable reward to apply for a job and get a good offer for it, but it doesn't turn people into compulsive job-applying robots. The strongest addictions to drugs also have little to do with being intermittent or variable. Someone can take a precisely measured abuse-threshold dose of a drug on a strict schedule and still develop compulsions to take more. Compulsions at a level that eclipse any behavior they'd encounter naturally. Intermittent variable reward schedules can be a factor in increasing anticipatory behavior and rewards, but claiming that they "will induce compulsive behavior" is a severe misunderstanding of the science.
• mrbungie 8mo ago
  > What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! Are you totally sure they are not measuring/optimizing engagement metrics? Because at least I can bet OpenAI is doing that with every product they have to offer.
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• mossTechnician 8mo ago
  At one point, people said Google's optimization target was giving you the right search results as soon as possible. What will prevent Anthropic from falling into the same pattern of enshittification as its predecessors, optimizing for profit like all other businesses?
  • mikkupikku 8mo ago
    I stopped using Google years ago because they stopped trying to provide good search results. If Anthropic stops trying to provide a good coding agent, I'll stop using them too.
  • trashb 8mo ago
    Slightly off topic actually but ill put it here. I found it interesting that Google removed the "summary cards" supposedly "to improve user experience" however the AI overview was added back. I suspect the AI overview is much more influenceable by advertisement money then the summary cards where.
• Aurornis 8mo ago
  > The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. The analogy was too strained to make sense. Despite being framed as a helpful plea to gambling addicts, I think it’s clear this post was actually targeted at an anti-LLM audience. It’s supposed to make the reader feel good for choosing not to use them by portraying LLM users as poor gambling addicts.
• scuff3d 8mo ago
  Right. A platform who makes money the more you have to use it is definitely optimizing to get you the right answer in as few tokens as possible. There is absolutely no incentive to do that, for any of these companies. The incentive is to make the model just bad enough you keep coming back, but not so bad you go to a competitor. We've already seen this play out. We know Google made their search results worse to drive up and revenue. Exact same incentives are at play here, only worse.
  • ctoth 8mo ago
    Please go read how the Anthropic max plan works. IF I USE LESS TOKENS, ANTHROPIC GETS MORE MONEY! You are blindly pattern matching to "corporation bad!" without actually considering the underlying structure of the situation. I believe there's a phrase for this to do with probabilistic avians?
    • maplethorpe 8mo ago
      What if I use zero tokens, as I'm currently doing? Do they get any money then?
    • eaglelamp 8mo ago
      As an investor in Anthropic which pricing strategy would you support? That's the question you need to ask, not what there current pricing strategy in the win the market phase happens to be.
      • materielle 8mo ago
        It’s sort of surprising how naive developers still are given the countless rug pulls over the past decade or two. You’re right on the money: the important thing to look at are the incentive structures. Basically all tech companies from the post-great financial crisis expansion (Google, post Balmer Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etc) started off user-friendly but all eventually converged towards their investment incentive structure. One big exception is Wikipedia. Not surprising since it has a completely different funding model! I’m sure Anthropic is super user friendly now, while they are focused on expansion and founding devs still have concentrated policial sway. It will eventually converge on its incentive structures to extract profit for shareholders like all other companies.
• evmaki 8mo ago
  The LLM is not the slot machine. The LLM is the lever of the slot machine, and the slot machine itself is capitalism. Pull the lever, see if it generates a marketable product or moment of virality, get rich if you hit the jackpot. If not, pull again.
  • mikkupikku 8mo ago
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  • ASalazarMX 8mo ago
    I don't know why you were downvoted. This is the FOMO that encourages agent gambling, automated experimentation in the hopes of accidentally striking digital gold before your peers do. A million monkeys racing 24/7 to create the next Harry Potter first. Ideas are a dime a dozen, now proofs of concept are a load of tokens a dozen.
• toss1 8mo ago
  Doesn't the alignment sort of depend on who is paying for all the tokens? If Dave the developer is paying, Dave is incentivized to optimize token use along with Anthropic (for the different reasons mentioned). If the Dave's employer, Earl, is paying and is mostly interested in getting Dave to work more, then what incentive does Dave have to minimize tokens? He's mostly incentivized by Earl to produce more code, and now also by Anthropic's accidentally variable-reward coding system, to code more... ?
• samrus 8mo ago
  > What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! That is a generous interpretation. Mighr be correct. But they dont make as much money if you quickly get the right answer. They make more money if you spend as many tokens as possible being on that "maybe next time" hook. Im not saying theyre actually optimizng for that. But charlie munger said "show me the incentives, and ill show you the outcome"
  • cedilla 8mo ago
    I know for sure that each and every AI I use wants to write whole novellas in response to every prompt unless I carefully remind it to keep responses short over and over and over again. This didn't used to be the case, so I assume that it must be intentional.
    • djaro 8mo ago
      I've noticed this getting a lot worse recently. I just want to ask a simple question, and end up gettig a whole essay in response, an 8-step plan, and 5 follow-up questions. Lately ChatGPT has also been referencing previous conversations constantly, as if to prove that it "knows" me. "Should I add oregano to brown beans or would that not taste good?" "Great instinct! Based on your interests in building new apps and learning new languages, you are someone who enjoys discovering new things, and it makes sense that you'd want to experiment with new flavor profiles as well. Your combination of oregano and brown beans is a real fusion of Italian and Mexican food, skillfully synthesizing these two cultures. Here's a list of 5 random unrelated spices you can also add to brown beans: Also, if you want to, I can create a list of other recipes that incorporate these oregano. Just say the words "I am hungry" and I will get right back to it!" Also, random side note, I hate ChatGPT asking me to "say the word" or "repeat the sentence". Just ask me if I want it and then I say yes or no, I am not going to repeat "go oregano!" like some sort of magic keyphrase to unlock a list of recipes.
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• bandrami 8mo ago
  > What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! Wait, what? Anthropic makes money by getting you to buy and expend tokens. The last thing they want is for you to get the right answer as fast as possible. They want you to sometimes get the right answer unpredictably, but with enough likelihood that this time will work that you keep hitting Enter.
  • theon144 8mo ago
    Given that pre-paid plans are the most popular way to subscribe to Claude, it quite plainly is a "the less tokens you use, the more money Anthropic makes" kind of situation. In an environment where providers are almost entirely interchangeable and tiniest of perceived edges (because there's still no benchmark unambiguously judging which model is "better") make or break user retention, I just don't see how it's not ludicrous on its face that any LLM provider would be incentivized to give unreliable answers at some high-enough probability.
• crystal_revenge 8mo ago
  > What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! What makes you believe this? The current trend in all major providers seem to be: get you to spin up as many agents as possible so that you can get billed more and their number of requests goes up. > Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design LLMs by all major providers are optimized used RLHF where they are optimized in ways we don't entirely understand to keep you engaged. These are incredibly naive assumptions. Anthropic/OpenAI/etc don't care if you get your "answer solved quickly", they care that you keep paying and that all their numbers go up. They aren't doing this as a favor to you and there's no reason to believe that these systems are optimized in your interest. > I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after. The core argument of the "gambling hypothesis" is that many of these people aren't really building things. To be clear, I certainly don't know if this is true of you in particular, it probably isn't. But just because this doesn't apply to you specifically doesn't mean it's not a solid argument.
  • YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
    Bill is unrelated to their cost. If they can produce answer in 1/10th of the token, they can charge 10x more per token, likely even more.
    • Drakim 8mo ago
      That is simply not true, token price is largely determined by the token price of their rival services (even before their own operational costs). If everybody else charges about $1 per millions of tokens, then they will also charge about $1 per millions of tokens (or slightly above/below) regardless of how many answers per token they can provide.
      • sixtyj 8mo ago
        This applies when there is a large number of competitors. Now companies are fighting for the attention of a finite number of customers, so they keep their prices in line with those around them. I remember when Google started with PPC - because few companies were using it, it cost a fraction of recent prices. And the other issue to solve is future lack of electricity for land data centers. If everyone wants to use LLM… but data centers capacity is finite due to available power -> token prices can go up. But IMHO devs will find an innovative approach for tokens, less energy demanding… so token prices will probably stay low.
• mh2266 8mo ago
  Anthropic themselves have described CC as a slot machine: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135ad8871e7658.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135a... (cmd-f "slot machine")
  • wiseowise 8mo ago
    No, no, you misunderstand! It’s means something else!
• pjc50 8mo ago
  > "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix" This is subtly different. It's not clear that the people depicted like making things, in the sense of enjoying the process. The narrative is about LLMs fitting into the already-existing startup culture. There's already a blurry boundary between "risky investment" and "gambling", given that most businesses (of all types, not just startups) have a high failure rate. The socially destructive characteristic identified here is: given more opportunity to pull the handle on the gambling machine, people are choosing to do that at the expense of other parts of their life. But yes, this relies on a subjective distinction between "building, but with unpredictable results" and "gambling, with its associated self-delusions".
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• timcobb 8mo ago
  > The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. yeah I think the bluesky embed is much more along the lines of what I'm experiencing than the OP itself.
• jplusequalt 8mo ago
  >The pathologizing of "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix" requires you to treat passive consumption as the healthy baseline, which is obviously a claim nobody in this conversation is bothering to defend I think their greater argument was to highlight how agentic coding is eroding work life balance, and that companies are beginning to make that the norm.
• beepbooptheory 8mo ago
  You may have a point but either way: immediately taking it personally like this and creating a whole semi-rant that includes something to the effect "I've been doing this since before you were born" really makes you sound like a person with a gambling problem. Trust me, we all feel like the house is our friend until its isn't!
• RamblingCTO 8mo ago
  Thank you! I don't get how so many people want to see dark patterns everywhere. All arguments miss the big counterargument: in a world where you have competitors, even free ones, you can't fuck around. You need to get it working. it's not a slot machine for me. How on earth are people using it? And if it would be I'd take my money elsewhere (kimi for example, openrouter or whatever). It needs to do my work as correct as possible. That's the business they are in. Tech folks talking about economics is so cringe. It's always just "corporations bad". As if they exist in a vacuum.
• randusername 8mo ago
  Disagree. Unreliability is intractable because of the human, not the tool. Even a perfect LLM will not be able to produce perfect outputs because humans will never put in all the context necessary to zero-shot any non-trivial query. LLMs can't read your mind and will always make distasteful assumptions unless driven by users without any unique preferences or a lot of time on their hands to ruminate on exactly how they want something done. I think it will always be mostly boring back-and-forth until the jackpot comes. Maybe future generations will align their preferences with the default LLM output instead of human preferences in that domain, though.
• phplovesong 8mo ago
  Claude RARELY get it right on the fifth time. Usually i write the damn thing when my account is on "cooldown".
• jrflowers 8mo ago
  > What's Anthropic's optimization target??? It is a business that sells monthly subscriptions