4 ms·

AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made u

AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the better overall company, the NSA uses it!!". I mean gov foes with Anthropic are probably true, but the marketing is to blame not Mythos capabilities. This is all so fucking pathetic

ToucanLoucan 3mo ago
All for a product that has yet to make a single honest dollar in profit for anyone who isn't nvidia. When this goes we might well see a recession. Not that anyone responsible will be worse off, of course.
- tempodox 3mo ago
  The perpetrators all have their golden parachutes. The taxpayers will foot the bill.
  - expedition32 3mo ago
    The US is trillions in debt. We live in the age of magic- nobody foots the bill.
- scottyah 3mo ago
  Why on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?
  - ToucanLoucan 3mo ago
    Silly me, expecting a company worth a trillion dollars to make... some money. Any money. A single profitable product.
    - aspenmartin 3mo ago
      Well the good thing is you’ve done the homework to definitively demonstrate that this is remotely true. These confident claims of this all being some sort of unprofitable Ponzi scheme, not understanding the concept of a growth phase which a multitude of highly successful tech companies have already demonstrated work while simultaneously commenting on a site with YCombinator in the url are just getting amusing now. Of course this is a profitable technology, and it doesn’t matter if any of the labs are profitable today or not. Running at a loss is a perfectly rational strategy.
    - nl 3mo ago
      Anthropic is running at an operating profit this quarter: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-... (It's actually probably more profitable than their projections here calculated because they were expecting to be running Fable but can't, and Opus costs less to run)
bflesch 3mo ago
We should seriously reframe this whole AI thing to "SI = simulated intelligence". It's google in a box. Great achievement, makes knowledge work faster, but please stop bothering everyone else. The Uber and Groupon people became billionaires, so the "Simulated Intelligence" folks will also achieve it. No need to worry and drown everyone in these bs stories only non-tech people believe.
- AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
  Heh. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, "SI" means "synthetic intelligence", which is a level below real AI (which means what we would call AGI). And, as it says (in https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21), SI translates to "kinda stupid".
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- ianm218 3mo ago
  Can you describe your experience using modern AI tools that led to this conclusion? It is hard for me to wrap my head around how my perception could be so different from someone else in presumably the same or similar profession. I'm not asking this in bad faith either but I think your getting downvoted because your comment comes off as a pretty strong assertion without giving details on how you got there.
  - bflesch 3mo ago
    A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears. At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it. It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction. I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.
colechristensen 3mo ago
I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, and upstream a minor bug in and erlang/OTP ssh key implementation with Opus in maybe 20 minutes (+2 weeks or so for upstream). It is not impossible that I could have done this before, but it would have taken days or weeks. The actual fix was about 2 lines of code, hardly AI slop, but getting there would have been quite the slog, and I never would have done it. There is a lot of the reason for AI skepticism out there, but people tend to do massive overcorrections and underestimate the force multiplier it can be, particularly for people with some idea of what they're doing and a good grasp of how to take advantage of the tool.
- medlazik 3mo ago
  I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing.
  - gallerdude 3mo ago
    So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity. Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.
    - ifwinterco 3mo ago
      The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value. Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
      - aspenmartin 3mo ago
        Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion.
thewebguyd 3mo ago
> and "AI will take your job" Don't forget, its no longer cool to say that now that the public has pushed back. The fact they all changed their tone away from taking jobs tells you that it was all just entirely marketing.
- scottyah 3mo ago
  Seems to me that they were mostly right, and the message was received by the right people. No need to ensure it gets distributed to the wrong people.
- yoyohello13 3mo ago
  All the CEOs very quickly changed their messaging after Altman's house got molotoved.
tempodox 3mo ago
But the propaganda deluge was a smash hit so far, HN is drowning in “AI” BS, and astroturfers and spin doctors haven’t seen that much business since the cold war. They made more profit than shovel salesmen in the gold rush.
expedition32 3mo ago
The US has gone all in on AI because it is one of the few things in which they still have an advantage over Asian countries. I wouldn't use the word pathetic but rather "desperation".
- ianm218 3mo ago
  So is your position that i.e. the Five Eyes [1] cyber security leaders are just pretending that AI cyber security is a serious thing to play into the geopolitical east vs. west thing and its not genuine? It just feels like people are starting to reach for conspiracy theories rather than engage with the idea that these models might actually be dangerous. [1]. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecurity-risks-warning/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecuri...
  - michaelt 3mo ago
    The “Five Eyes cyber security leaders” aren’t exactly famous for their political independence, or for having the public’s best interests at heart, or erring on the side of regulating less. You don’t get very far in the spying profession with honesty.
chasd00 3mo ago
I haven’t heard anything about AGI in a long while. Oh yeah, and per conversations last Jan we were all supposed to be out of our jobs by now.
- joquarky 3mo ago
  I'm just glad there are so many jobs. Just look at the latest unemployment numbers! I wonder if this era of peace and prosperity will be remembered as the peak of humanity? And did you see that chocolate rations increased again last month! It's literally incredible.

ToucanLoucan 3mo ago

All for a product that has yet to make a single honest dollar in profit for anyone who isn't nvidia. When this goes we might well see a recession. Not that anyone responsible will be worse off, of course.

tempodox 3mo ago
The perpetrators all have their golden parachutes. The taxpayers will foot the bill.
- expedition32 3mo ago
  The US is trillions in debt. We live in the age of magic- nobody foots the bill.
scottyah 3mo ago
Why on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?
- ToucanLoucan 3mo ago
  Silly me, expecting a company worth a trillion dollars to make... some money. Any money. A single profitable product.
  - aspenmartin 3mo ago
    Well the good thing is you’ve done the homework to definitively demonstrate that this is remotely true. These confident claims of this all being some sort of unprofitable Ponzi scheme, not understanding the concept of a growth phase which a multitude of highly successful tech companies have already demonstrated work while simultaneously commenting on a site with YCombinator in the url are just getting amusing now. Of course this is a profitable technology, and it doesn’t matter if any of the labs are profitable today or not. Running at a loss is a perfectly rational strategy.
  - nl 3mo ago
    Anthropic is running at an operating profit this quarter: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-... (It's actually probably more profitable than their projections here calculated because they were expecting to be running Fable but can't, and Opus costs less to run)

bflesch 3mo ago

We should seriously reframe this whole AI thing to "SI = simulated intelligence". It's google in a box. Great achievement, makes knowledge work faster, but please stop bothering everyone else. The Uber and Groupon people became billionaires, so the "Simulated Intelligence" folks will also achieve it. No need to worry and drown everyone in these bs stories only non-tech people believe.

AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
Heh. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, "SI" means "synthetic intelligence", which is a level below real AI (which means what we would call AGI). And, as it says (in https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21), SI translates to "kinda stupid".
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
ianm218 3mo ago
Can you describe your experience using modern AI tools that led to this conclusion? It is hard for me to wrap my head around how my perception could be so different from someone else in presumably the same or similar profession. I'm not asking this in bad faith either but I think your getting downvoted because your comment comes off as a pretty strong assertion without giving details on how you got there.
- bflesch 3mo ago
  A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears. At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it. It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction. I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.

colechristensen 3mo ago

I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, and upstream a minor bug in and erlang/OTP ssh key implementation with Opus in maybe 20 minutes (+2 weeks or so for upstream). It is not impossible that I could have done this before, but it would have taken days or weeks. The actual fix was about 2 lines of code, hardly AI slop, but getting there would have been quite the slog, and I never would have done it. There is a lot of the reason for AI skepticism out there, but people tend to do massive overcorrections and underestimate the force multiplier it can be, particularly for people with some idea of what they're doing and a good grasp of how to take advantage of the tool.

medlazik 3mo ago
I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing.
- gallerdude 3mo ago
  So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity. Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.
  - ifwinterco 3mo ago
    The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value. Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
    - aspenmartin 3mo ago
      Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion.

thewebguyd 3mo ago

> and "AI will take your job" Don't forget, its no longer cool to say that now that the public has pushed back. The fact they all changed their tone away from taking jobs tells you that it was all just entirely marketing.

scottyah 3mo ago
Seems to me that they were mostly right, and the message was received by the right people. No need to ensure it gets distributed to the wrong people.
yoyohello13 3mo ago
All the CEOs very quickly changed their messaging after Altman's house got molotoved.

tempodox 3mo ago

But the propaganda deluge was a smash hit so far, HN is drowning in “AI” BS, and astroturfers and spin doctors haven’t seen that much business since the cold war. They made more profit than shovel salesmen in the gold rush.

expedition32 3mo ago

The US has gone all in on AI because it is one of the few things in which they still have an advantage over Asian countries. I wouldn't use the word pathetic but rather "desperation".

ianm218 3mo ago
So is your position that i.e. the Five Eyes [1] cyber security leaders are just pretending that AI cyber security is a serious thing to play into the geopolitical east vs. west thing and its not genuine? It just feels like people are starting to reach for conspiracy theories rather than engage with the idea that these models might actually be dangerous. [1]. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecurity-risks-warning/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecuri...
- michaelt 3mo ago
  The “Five Eyes cyber security leaders” aren’t exactly famous for their political independence, or for having the public’s best interests at heart, or erring on the side of regulating less. You don’t get very far in the spying profession with honesty.

chasd00 3mo ago

I haven’t heard anything about AGI in a long while. Oh yeah, and per conversations last Jan we were all supposed to be out of our jobs by now.

joquarky 3mo ago
I'm just glad there are so many jobs. Just look at the latest unemployment numbers! I wonder if this era of peace and prosperity will be remembered as the peak of humanity? And did you see that chocolate rations increased again last month! It's literally incredible.