It's somewhat difficult to have any sympathy for Anthropic here. They're entirely responsible for selling tokens at below cost, with the age-old bait-and-switch tactic.
If they weren't doing so, then these Chinese resellers wouldn't be viable.
Radical idea, but how about they actually charge a viable price, even on subscription plans?
Shocking. Been open a week and AFAICT just silence from OpenAI. I just find it baffling. You'd think that these vendors would be very sensitive to this sort of issue. I mean, surely they have multiple agents hooked up to github monitoring potential issues and proposing fixes, right? ...right?
Surely it should be trivial for them to have their own tools spinning away trying to fix all the github issues in real time...
Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s
My theory is that anthropic have hit the beginnings of model collapse and the whole "fable may silently downgrade with deliberately incorrect results" is a diabolical attempt to gas light and get ahead of the curve.
So when it fails, people will chalk it up to "oh. Must have been silently downgraded because it thought I was doing something tricky enough to count as a distillation attack. My bad. Lemme try again..."
It's bizarre isn't it. It being treated as though actually knowing how to write quality code by hand is a skill that's somehow been lost to time...
I can only guess that a lot of the engineers who went into software purely for money were all too happy to distance themselves from writing code and really don't want to go back...
As a thought experiment, would their reaction have been any different if the hidden prompt had caused their agent to enter an expensive coding loop instead of just deleting the dependency + tests? If I were to use coding agents/LLMs (I don't), this is what I'd be more concerned about...
Much as I dislike some of Peter Thiel's ideas, I fully agree with him that Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire is at the heart of the explanation. We've always been imitators who need to copy behavior and sentiments, but social media has turbocharged this cycle, allowing mass delusions and panics to be cycled through every few years. The herd always works itself up into a frenzy before collapsing and, a couple of years later, moving on to the next delusion/panic.
And when people are gripped by these crowd-following delusions it definitely leads to the baffling blindness to reality...
If you're willing to go back to the 13th century, Aquinas and the blindness of the mind provide a timeless explanation. They literally cannot see the truth... it's baffling until you realise this and then pity them. They’re in a mini hell of their own making where the LLM is really alive and they’re both awed and terrified of it simultaneously.
Of the same mind. It's a mass panic with overtones of covid. The only explanation I can think of is that most of those who are convinced that AI is going to make engineering redundant are those who've never ventured into the deeper engineering water; never experienced large-scale product engineering and support etc (or have forgotten what it's like).
If there were real gains to be had, we'd see the biggest adopters pulling ahead of their competitors and gaining unassailable leads. It's not happening... Where are the companies which are breaking out and crushing their competitors? Why haven't there been breakouts? Why is software quality seeming (subjectively) to be going in reverse?
All we’ve got is a boatloads of slop, a tsunami of cloned products that their ‘creators’ don’t understand, everything being overrun by bots. It’s just a tidal wave of dross. Where’s the value?
This is one of the things people miss. If they double their customers, of course they double their expenses. Unlike SW, the marginal cost here is still high
Really appreciate this discussion as I'll be shortly going through this with a 1-2 person company. Does anyone have any experience on how it compares to ISO27001 from the 1-2 person company feasibility standpoint?
It’s turning into a bit of a grift now. So many crypto agility “consultants “ popping up with their slop graphics. Never mind the fact that even if a relevant quantum computer is built it will still cost the user millions of dollars to break each RSA key pair…
Re displacing freelance translation, yes - it can displace the 95% of cases where 95% accuracy is enough. Like you mention though, for diplomatic translations, court proceedings, pacemaker manuals etc you're still going to need a human at least checking every line since the cost of any mistake is so high
This is going to be the concrete block which finally breaks the back of the academic peer review system, i.e. it's going to be a DDoS attack on a system which didn't even handle the load before LLMs.
Maybe we'll need to go back to some sort of proof-of-work system, i.e. only accepting physical mailed copies of manuscripts, possibly hand-written...
LaTeX was one of the last bastions against AI slop. Sadly it's now fallen too. Is there any standardised non-AI disclaimer format which is gaining use?
Or maybe there's been a bit too much hype...