double standard outrage from many, honestly, they're watermarking it. they've already told industry they take steps to mitigate distillation. Where's all the outrage over similar blackbox activities like how Steam performs VAC bans or how Gmail finds and blocks Spam?
You don't create a security measure then tell everyone how to bypass it.
I think OP is pointing something interesting out but the undertones of caution and "what else are they hiding" seem melodramatic and I find that hard to take serious.
The internet gives people a platform and, in a lot of ways, this supplants the typical role of journalism. The issue with this is no one wants to act like a journalist and actually explain the truth around a set of facts. Instead, they'll portray their opinions as a narrative and every time that resonates with someone or gets signal boosted, that narrative grows more assertive in the typical discourse I see nowadays. I would find it far more interesting to see what explanation Anthropic gives for these features than to immediately cry foul.
I'm always so hesitant to do that, I really value getting news within the first 3 hours of it becoming available so doing weekly digests makes me feel like I'm losing something valuable, but I guess that could be solved with a personalized feed.. hmmm
honestly, doom scrolling + surrounding myself with people intensely interested in the topic. I basically just info overload myself on an hourly basis and since I find it interesting enough it tends to make its way into the sticky part of my memory.
to give you an idea of what I mean, I'm checking bluesky, reddot, HN, youtube, instagram, tiktok, discord basically every hour. every morning, lunch, and evening I'm checking my email where I receive about a dozen or so newsletters either weekly or daily. a few times a week (usually weekends) I'm browsing github and arxiv for the whatever random thought or interest is the flavor of the week (lately its been on EOE techniques and classifiers). This has lead me to collect the names of a good number of authors I trust and that appear to be thought leaders in the space.
I don't think this approach is good at all, in fact, it feels neurotic and I think its an unhealthy obsession borne from my adhd, but its kept me going for the last 3ish years and I don't feel the slightest bit burnt out. personally I find the whole field of AI/ML to be immensely exciting so I think that part of it is a huge driver for how I personally stay up-to-date.
ideally I would offload a lot of these activities to a research agent and tbh I "plan" to eventually, same way I plan to gut short form videos and social media from my life and get 8hrs of sleep. Eventually.
funny how wired got the masses of the internet on board with hating AI, helping to spark the whole anti-movement and people still continue to rely on them for their understanding of AI and current events.
I feel like they report in a vaccum. take this anti exfil policy for claude, it was plainly explained as part of the launch of Anthropics new product. Security like this isn't novel, it isn't bad, you don't explain how your security works to the people you're securing against. Nobody freaks out about Steam's VAC ban system, no one is investigating gmail's spam filtering, Reddits vote fuzzing, cloudflares bot detection, or Vercel for blocking proxying services.
whats really the distinguishing principle? Is it really just not liking Anthropic's opinions? then just say that and use a different llm. chemist, biologists, and AI researchers cry a river lmao
for weeks now I've been having cloudflare issues. I find the status pages are less and less reliable as technically they aren't experiencing an outage if they just have a policy that resets or outright denies your request...
the halving of error rates for image inputs is pretty awesome, this makes it far more practical for issues where it isn't easy to input all the needed context. when I get lazy I'll just shift+win+s the problem and ask one of the chatbots to solve it.
it feels incredibly dumb now, getting some really basic questions wrong and just throwing nuance to the wind. for claiming to be more human, it understands far less. for example: if I start at a negative net worth how long until I am a millionaire if I consistently grow 2.5% each month? Anyone here would have a basic understand the premise and be able to start answering, 5.1 says it's impossible, with hand holding it will insist you can only reach 0 but that growth isn't the same as a source of income. further hand holding gets it to the point of insisting it cannot continue without making assumptions, goading it will have it arrive at the incorrect value of 72 months, further goading will get 240 months, it took the lazy way out and assumed a static inflation from 2024, then a static income.
o3 is getting it no problem, first try, a simple and reasonable answer, 101 months.
claude (opus 4.1) does as well, 88-92 months, though it uses target inflation numbers instead of something more realistic.
but, to be fair, simply calling the sampler random is what gives people the impression like what OP is complaining about. which isn't entirely accurate, it's actually fairly bounded.
this plays back into my original comment, which you have to understand to know that the sampler, for all its "randomness" should only be seeing and picking from a variety of correct answers, i.e. the sample pool should only have all the acceptable answers to "randomly" pick from. so when there are bad or nonsensical answers that are different every time, it's not because the models are too random, it's because they're dumb and need more training. tweaking your architecture isn't going to fully prevent that.
Well really, the reason why I gripe about it, to use your example, is that then they believe the indicator light malfunctioning is an intrinsic feature of stoves, so they throw their stove out and start cooking over campfires instead, tried and true, predictable, whatever that means.
I think my deck of cards example still holds.
You could argue I'm being uselessly pedantic, that could totally be the case, but personally I think that's cope to avoid having to think very hard.
> A lack of determinism comes from many places, but primarily: 1) The models change 2) The models are not deterministic...
models themselves are deterministic, this is a huge pet peeve of mine, so excuse the tangent, but the appearance of nondeterminism comes from a few sources, but imho can be largely attributed to the probabilistic methods used to get appropriate context and enable timely responses. here's an example of what I mean, a 52-card deck. The deck order is fixed once you shuffle it. Drawing "at random" is a probabilistic procedure on top of that fixed state. We do not call the deck probabilistic. We call the draw probabilistic. Another exmaple, a pot of water heating on a stove. Its temperature follows deterministic physics. A cheap thermometer adds noisy, random error to each reading. We do not call the water probabilistic. We call the measurement probabilistic.
Theoretical physicists run into such problems, albeit far more complicated, and the concept for how they deal with them is called ergodicity. The models at the root of LLM's do exhibit ergodic behavior; the time average and the ensemble average of an observable are identical, i.e. the average response of a single model over a long duration and the average of many similar models at a fixed moment are equivalent.
You don't create a security measure then tell everyone how to bypass it.
I think OP is pointing something interesting out but the undertones of caution and "what else are they hiding" seem melodramatic and I find that hard to take serious.
The internet gives people a platform and, in a lot of ways, this supplants the typical role of journalism. The issue with this is no one wants to act like a journalist and actually explain the truth around a set of facts. Instead, they'll portray their opinions as a narrative and every time that resonates with someone or gets signal boosted, that narrative grows more assertive in the typical discourse I see nowadays. I would find it far more interesting to see what explanation Anthropic gives for these features than to immediately cry foul.