4 ms·

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 an

by 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
  > you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. I mean this only works if Anthropic is the only game in town. In your analogy if anyone else builds a casino with a higher payout then they lose the game. With the rate of LLM improvement over the years, this doesn't seem like a stable means of business.
  - tsimionescu 8mo ago
    While I don't know if this applies to AI usage, but actual gambling addicts most certainly do not shop around for the best possible rewards: they stick more or less to the place they got addicted at initially. Not to mention, there's plenty of people addicted to "casinos" that give 0 monetary rewards, such as Candy Crush or Farmville back in the day and Genshin Impact or other gacha games today. So, if there's a way to get people addicted to AI conversations, that's an excellent way to make money even if you are way behind your competitors, as addicted buyers are much more loyal that other clients.
    - mikkupikku 8mo ago
      You're taking the gambling analogy too seriously. People do in fact compare different LLMs and shop around. How gamblers choose casinos is literally irrelevant because this whole analogy is nothing more than a retarded excuse for AI holdouts to feel smug.
krackers 8mo ago
The timescale is one difference, it's hard to get "sucked in" in the gambling-like mindless state when the timescales are over seasons as opposed to minutes. There's a reason gambling isn't done in a correspondence format.
- sph 8mo ago
  In human physiology/psychology as well, the chance of addiction itself is a function of timescale. This is why a nicotine patch is much less addictive than insufflated nicotine (hours to reach peak effect vs seconds), or why addictive software have plenty of sensory experiences attached to every action, to keep the user engaged.
DANmode 8mo ago
Are you a pepper farmer taking this approach to feed your family, or a hobbyist gardener?
mejutoco 8mo ago
Not OP, but they said: > Intermittent variable rewards ... will induce compulsive behavior As a dog owner this is why you need to give a variable amount of treats (sometimes zero) to your dog when they obey a command, for the "jackpot effect". For example, if I land a trick while skating it gives me a boost. Is that addictive behaviour? not sure. It gets me to exercise. My point is that variability is probably part of what gets you back to pepper planting and fishing. Intermittent variable rewards reinforcing a behaviour seems to be a fact. If this is good or bad regarding a specific activity is left as an exercise for the reader. EDIT: grammar

by ctoth 8mo ago

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
> you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. I mean this only works if Anthropic is the only game in town. In your analogy if anyone else builds a casino with a higher payout then they lose the game. With the rate of LLM improvement over the years, this doesn't seem like a stable means of business.
- tsimionescu 8mo ago
  While I don't know if this applies to AI usage, but actual gambling addicts most certainly do not shop around for the best possible rewards: they stick more or less to the place they got addicted at initially. Not to mention, there's plenty of people addicted to "casinos" that give 0 monetary rewards, such as Candy Crush or Farmville back in the day and Genshin Impact or other gacha games today. So, if there's a way to get people addicted to AI conversations, that's an excellent way to make money even if you are way behind your competitors, as addicted buyers are much more loyal that other clients.
  - mikkupikku 8mo ago
    You're taking the gambling analogy too seriously. People do in fact compare different LLMs and shop around. How gamblers choose casinos is literally irrelevant because this whole analogy is nothing more than a retarded excuse for AI holdouts to feel smug.

krackers 8mo ago

The timescale is one difference, it's hard to get "sucked in" in the gambling-like mindless state when the timescales are over seasons as opposed to minutes. There's a reason gambling isn't done in a correspondence format.

sph 8mo ago
In human physiology/psychology as well, the chance of addiction itself is a function of timescale. This is why a nicotine patch is much less addictive than insufflated nicotine (hours to reach peak effect vs seconds), or why addictive software have plenty of sensory experiences attached to every action, to keep the user engaged.

DANmode 8mo ago

Are you a pepper farmer taking this approach to feed your family, or a hobbyist gardener?

mejutoco 8mo ago

Not OP, but they said: > Intermittent variable rewards ... will induce compulsive behavior As a dog owner this is why you need to give a variable amount of treats (sometimes zero) to your dog when they obey a command, for the "jackpot effect". For example, if I land a trick while skating it gives me a boost. Is that addictive behaviour? not sure. It gets me to exercise. My point is that variability is probably part of what gets you back to pepper planting and fishing. Intermittent variable rewards reinforcing a behaviour seems to be a fact. If this is good or bad regarding a specific activity is left as an exercise for the reader. EDIT: grammar