You can set it to 1h. The analysis script Claude wrote for me says I'm saving 11% over the 5m window by doing that on my API account.
It's something, at least.
4,393 karma · joined June 15, 2012
It's something, at least.
I now try to only give examples of how I want it to do things, and hooks that complain when they do the bad thing (but still don't mention the bad thing in the complaint.)
Email was awesome when it first became widespread. I could cold-email random professors at other universities (I was in school at the time) and get meaningful responses back. Then lots of people (and companies) started cold-emailing, and it stopped working.
Social media is broken if there's nobody there, is great with a medium-sized community, and is broken if everyone is there.
Ad-supported websites can offer all kinds of valuable free services. Up until either (1) they become so ad-infested that they're no longer useful, or (2) all the users block ads.
There was a wave of websites providing APIs for programmatic access a while back. You could script together whatever flow you wanted. If no API was offered, you could scrape the HTML. That triggered a wave of alternate interfaces to sites, skipping their ads, skipping their engagement funnels, separating the value from the cost. So everything got locked up behind captchas and accounts and API keys with limited access.
This outcome was always inevitable. Humans don't understand social contracts, or they do and both sides abuse the hell out of it. We feel entitled to have just the loss leaders without ever buying anything else. When running businesses, we feel entitled to keep adding more and more adds and generally enshittifying the experience. People can take it or leave it, after all.
Agents don't change the underlying structure at all. They just magnify and accelerate parts of the system, and will therefore magnify and accelerate the reactive and defensive responses.
"Anybody who wants to" is precisely the problem -- there's no correlation between a rando's wishes and the health of a project or working environment. You need people with skin in the game, and in the right game.
But they should be marked experimental in that case, not optional. Optional flags ought to work together, or at least it should be considered a bug worth quickly fixing if they don't. Combining experimental flags otoh is Buyer Beware.
Quite a few husbands believe they should have control over their wives' votes. I guess you'd say they should have the courage to leave them and wreck their children's lives and be ostracized by their family and community?
And it's not hard to imagine certain employers having a strong opinion on how you vote on specific measures. Of course they couldn't compel anyone to reveal their votes, but it could be made customary enough that refusing to would be enough of a signal. I guess you'd need the courage to quit and take a lower paying job?
Of course AI-less wars have always had innocent victims. I'm not even arguing whether using AI will produce more or fewer such victims, and at the moment I don't see how anyone could convincingly argue either way. The use of AI is probably a pretty minor driver behind the number of inappropriate targets.
I do argue that people (one or more humans) must be responsible for these decisions, and furthermore having a human in the loop is a necessary prerequisite for such responsibility. (A human is still responsible if there is no human in the loop of individual decisions; the people who allowed that usage were in the loop of making that decision, and thereby have responsibility.)
If we start agreeing that we can just blame the AI for any unintended casualties, then we lose most incentives to reduce such casualties. Even if an AI makes "better" decisions than a human, wars are always resource-constrained and decisions will be made based on responsibility and blame. For example, the decision might be "the AI needs too much data to make accurate decisions, gathering those data is expensive, let's give it less." We cannot allow the "cheapest" decision when push comes to shove to be the one where innocent people are killed because the perpetrators have externalized the responsibility.
In the case under discussion, we're not at the point where anyone is claiming that an AI acting alone will kill fewer unintended people than an AI+a human. The people who develop the technology are specifically saying it is not ready yet. In large part, that comes down to responsibility again -- if Anthropic were to promote that use, then they would be part of the human chain that is responsible for those deaths.
In addition, using AI for autonomous killing is ridiculously dangerous and ill-advised at the present time. They have common and unpredictable failure modes. They have biases that could change something from 99% accurate to way less due to a change that should have no impact on the decisions. When using them for programming, they'll do things like directly go against instructions (whether or not they apologize afterwards) and getting stuck in loops. What are the analogous failure modes when you give them control over lethal weapons? They are not ready.
> > The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company.
> No company is owed contract from the US government.
The discussion is not about the contract. It is about the supply-chain risk designation. The contract issue is separate (and real! The DoD was trying to retroactively change the terms of an existing signed contract). The DoD is free to not sign any contracts with Anthropic. It is not right, and illegal in my and many people's opinions, to misuse a tool intended for preventing harm from foreign adversaries. It was retaliation, plain and simple.
> We are getting into the territory of "70% of traffic crashes are blamed on sober drivers, therefore driving sober is a crime".
You are, for some reason. I was not. I'm only countering an argument that the particular tragedy that made a splash in the news cannot be discounted by saying "sure it's awful, but irrelevant because AI was not involved." AI was involved. We don't have to imagine hypothetical scenarios where AI was involved and something bad happened. And I'm not saying AI was the cause, or the only cause, of that tragedy.
>> My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.
> As I said, extensively, the reality of warmaking will inevitably lead to innocent civilian casualties.
The word "reckless" was critical to what I said, because it's part of what makes something a war crime.
Ok, I give up. You're equating war crimes and any civilian casualties. Or wait, then you go on to equate war crimes with any suffering of innocents. Why? Why are you so set on dismissing the possibility of a war crime being a thing that happens, and has an actual definition that goes well beyond innocent people suffering? You seem motivated to steamroll any obstacle to using maximal force regardless of the consequences. Why? Hegseth, is that you?
Never mind, I don't think I need to know your answer. You are a rando on the internet to me.
Lest anyone think this is a brilliant idea: an LLM would likely be much better at doing the ~~RLHF~~ RLMF, so you haven't actually gained anything. But I feel like there may still be the kernel of a good idea somewhere in here.
Perhaps your assignment is to iteratively train the AI, which is pre-prompted to seek out every reasonably possible failure mode when it generates solutions. So the learning mechanism is to train an adversarial AI on the subject matter as a way of learning it yourself. This does not solve the problem of cheating with an LLM, it's an alternative pedagogical approach.
That's a weird phrase. It hints at an assumption or widespread belief that we aren't as corrupt or screwed up. Which I get; I was born and raised in the US, and I got a full dose of American exceptionalism too.
Corruption in particular is a tricky thing to define. Currently, it is patently obvious that we are quite a bit more corrupt than the median. The recent big spike is new, but if you pay attention to the news, you'll see that over and over again we're being presented with evidence that this is not a new thing. This is a longstanding thing and the only thing that's new is the degree of exposure. We may have been this corrupt in the past; there's some pretty mindblowing stuff in the history books. But I don't recall this level of naked corruption at any point in the country's history.
As for screwed up, we've held the crown on that for decades at this point. We've exported that trait throughout the world, so it's getting a little harder to tell. Also, there's plenty of homegrown screwed-upness for our variety to interbreed with.
But this is just an American talking to an American. To the rest of the world, the corruption and decay is and has been extremely obvious. Talk to Europeans. They see us as a third world country who happens to still have the biggest military and hold the world's reserve currency. (For now.) But the "third world" part is not an exaggeration, from the people I've talked to. And I can't really argue? Fascism is risen, we're ok with secret police disappearing people from our streets, we're ok with our public money being used to pay people to vote for a particular party. (If you object to "ok", protesting and writing strongly-worded messages on social media doesn't count. I confess that that's all I do.)
> Communism is better than capitalism.
Here's where I disagree. "Structure X is better than structure Y" conveys very little information and is not a useful framing. It's a real example of "ideas are worthless, execution is everything". Capitalism is fine. Free trade is powerful; it's capable of and has accomplished an enormous amount of good. It just needs to be protected and managed; free trade being good does not mean the freer the better, for any definition of "free" that someone wants to come up with. Communism is fine too. It's not even incompatible with competition. Hell, the actual systems in use today aren't even one or the other, the pure forms don't work and aren't acceptable to any population.
But perhaps you mean late stage capitalism and late stage communism. Those both suck, from what I can tell.
For my small-scale sqlite dB, it gets read access, and I encourage it to test modifications by copying it somewhere and writing into that.
Scale-dependent, but I hope to not have to work at a scale where it gets write access to the production DB. That just seems like asking for trouble.
The US has not declared war on Iran. No wartime legal mechanism is at play, and cannot be until Congress decides to declare war.
> Anthropic wanted them to be the last word in every decision, and DOD could not allow that
Cite one source for Anthropic demanding to be in the loop. This was about the terms of a contract. If I'm agreeing to sell you a medicine, under the condition that you do not use it to euthanize homeless people, that does not mean I am demanding to follow you around and make you ask me whether each use is ok.
> Nobody is destroying anybody's business - pretending that Anthropic could never find any users for their AI outside DOD is plain silly.
Strawman much? The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company. It doesn't matter whether there are other customers. It doesn't matter whether the company can survive the attack. What matters is whether it is legal and ethical for our public resources to be used for retaliation in this way.
> US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes....I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models"
This is an invented claim. Cite a source.
>> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident > > And this is supposed to be an argument because....?
The argument was the first part of the post. This part was me giving my perspective on things, in this case it was about how I don't find Anthropic's position to be good, just that OpenAI's is far worse. My post was not for you exclusively; based on what you have written, I have concluded that there is no value in debating you or attempting changing your mind.
>> They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes. > > You have a very vivid imagination. Not trying to use it to state things that could be misinterpreted as statements of fact would be nice.
Ok, fair. Sticking to facts: the crucial part of the negotiation was about whether the DoD can use Anthropic's products for autonomous decisions on lethal force. Since then, it has come out that AI was used in the decision to target an elementary school for girls that killed 120 schoolchildren. (The Palantir Maven Smart System, fwiw, not Claude.) The Pentagon investigated and found that although a human was theoretically in the decision loop, in practice the oversight was minimal and ineffective. "No one remaining on those teams [the teams tasked with minimizing civilian harm] reviewed the strike plans in advance of the attack on the school, according to Bloomberg." Those teams had been gutted, with Hegseth explicitly stating that they were getting in the way.
My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.
The whole conflict is specifically about uses that do not involve a human decision. The DoD agreed to a contract that said it wouldn't use Anthropic for that, and then tried to change the terms.
Incidentally, the DoD used Claude in its decision that resulted in killing 120 children at an elementary school for girls. The Pentagon concluded that there was human review (which would mean that it fell within the contract's terms) but that the review was hollowed out (which could mean that it was a violation of the contract).
Anthropic: "We'll sell you access to our AI as long as you don't use it for war crimes or mass surveillance."
DoD: "Ok, deal."
...time passes...
DoD: "Wait, no, we want to be able to use it for war crimes too."
Anthropic: "Too late, you agreed already, and we won't sign a contract for that. You can keep using it for everything we agreed to."
DoD: "Change the terms or we will destroy your business."
Anthropic: "No."
DoD then signs contracts with OpenAI and Google that permit them to commit war crimes and mass surveillance as long as they get legal cover, and proceeds to apply as much leverage as it can to destroy Anthropic's business.
----
And for the record, Anthropic agreed to all "yucky Army things" usage that was an extension of past yucky Army things, they just did not agree to a new class of yucky Army things: namely, fully autonomous killbots. Even there, it was only "not yet, it's not ready". Your whole comment is a gross mischaracterization.
I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident, and that's not because I find Anthropic's position to be saintly. They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.
Only it turns out that with sufficient corruption, you do.
Anthropic offered a contract, with certain conditions, as do all contracts everywhere; that's their purpose. The military did not want to agree to those conditions. If they had stopped there, and refused to sign the contract, all would be good. (It's actually worse, they did sign such a contract, and then decided they wanted the contract to say something different than it actually did. "Pray I don't alter it any further.")
> >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized [emphasis mine]
That is speculation, and you can't call it a "textbook designation" without discussing whether there's a basis for that "reasonable fear". Again, that argument also works for declaring you have a reasonable fear that giving money to Anthropic will support pedophilia. We do not know the specifics, but I at least have heard of zero evidence that Anthropic would sabotage something they signed a legal contract for, and yet I have an abundance of evidence that this administration will use whatever contortions are necessary to pressure and punish those who interfere with it getting what it wants. It all hinges on the word "reasonable", and based on the evidence that is public, this specific fear seems more ridiculous than reasonable to me.
If the government somehow had a way to force Anthropic to sign a contract that it did not want to sign, then this fear might become more reasonable. The twist is that this supply chain risk designation is exactly that. If Anthropic now capitulated, the accusation of supply chain risk (eg from Anthropic employees acting alone) would be justified. So the only way Anthropic can reasonably be considered a supply chain risk is because it is accused of being a supply chain risk.
This is a textbook example, yes, but it's a textbook example of corruption and judicial capture.
> Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
And if they signed a contract permitting fully autonomous killbots, then using the whitelist mechanism would be a contract violation. I have some degree of faith that we'd know if such a contract were signed, because half the staff would quit. (As opposed to half the Google staff quitting after signing such a contract, which has been proven to be an incorrect expectation -- such a contract was signed, and I've heard of exactly one person quitting over it. There may be more, I don't know.)
Drinking a glass of water is beneficial and necessary. Drinking 100L in one go and you're dead.
The argument is that the rate of AI influx is too high for our human systems to metabolize, and so the system will break down. Not just operate in a degraded way, but break down and cause mass catastrophe. Even there, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity, just 99.9% of us.
What the argument is not: AI is fundamentally poisonous. We are incapable of handling any level of AI. We will never be able to incorporate more AI. AI provides no benefit.
So quitting AI but still working on AI is not the contradiction it seems: you can quit accelerating AI and work on metabolizing it. And in fact that work is very necessary right now.
People are using AI.
Your argument is that AI cannot be a serious concern because it has major known limitations. But most of us are using it despite the major known limitations. So the existence of the known limitations is irrelevant to determining what level of harms are possible -- unless the known limitations are directly limiting the harms. In practice, it seems like most current harms, and many of the (not stupid) feared harms, are completely possible despite the known limitations. Sometimes even exacerbated by them. ("Sorry, you told me to never stop your insulin pump, but I stopped your insulin pump while diagnosing a test failure. I will record in my memory file that I must always... hello? user?")
The (not stupid) parenthetical might be too weaselly for you, but that's how I see the "AI is going to rise up and intentionally subjugate or exterminate humanity" brand of doomerism. While I don't think that's strictly impossible, there are so many other ways harms that are much more imminent and much harder to defend against, that it seems foolish (to me!) to worry about those.
If you can stop a problem by pulling out the plug, you don't have a real problem.
If you don't want to pull out the plug, you do have a real problem. (Don't want, or can't afford to, or can't be bothered to so extremely that you never will, or whatever.)
The good part is showing that the drop in thinking tokens persists no matter what grouping you slice across. They make a very persuasive case that there's something systematic going on.
My usual complaint about these "they're nerfing the models, I feel it in my bones!" posts is that they don't account for the workload changing. From working on my own stuff, there are a series of evolutionary/de-evolutionary changes that happen in a heavily AI-written codebase. Initially everything goes great. Then the AI takes on too much technical debt. Improvements slow down and regressions creep up until it becomes a never-ending game of whack-a-mole just to keep up. So you direct some (probably AI) effort towards cleaning things up, reducing duplication, and removing patches for problems that are better fixed with a design change, or workarounds because the harness saw the wrong version or you incorrectly described a problem and it strenuously solved a non-problem. That gets you back up to cruising speed for a while, then the project exceeds some hidden threshold for size in latent space or something, and further progress has to rely on attending to one aspect of the codebase at a time. Once again, the architecture becomes the limiting factor, but in a subtly different way. My sense is that it all boils down to some sort of "attention capacity" -- is your codebase and problem space amenable to looking at one aspect at a time, or is it all snarled together? -- but that's an essay that I'd love to write but really don't have enough experience to do justice.
Anyway, the details don't matter. The point is that not only can you not assume that the difficulty presented to the AI is roughly constant over time, but also there's evidence to believe that it will be normally be increasing. (Unless you're constantly starting new projects instead of continuing old ones.)
That's why I like this writeup. Focusing on thinking trails doesn't eliminate the problem of snowballing difficulty, but it does sidestep the worst of it. In fact, I'd expect the same setup to think more as the complexity/sloppiness creeps up.
The flawed part that bothered me was that it feels like there's a little bit of a predetermined conclusion that thinking is a magic sauce that makes everything taste better if you spread it on everything. I want a high variance on thinking, especially between interactions. A smarter model would have a higher variance, in my opinion. So the accusatory tone (perhaps I should reread it? My first impressions are often wrong) around "look! it doesn't bother to think at all a lot of the time. That can't be right!" seems misguided to me. It should think when it needs to, and if its thinking was clear then it won't need to re-think over and over again; it's all still in the context.
Forgive the anthropomorphization, but consider those studies of chess experts vs novices. Novices have to work way harder, working through all kinds of things from scratch, while the expert instantly and effortlessly recognizes what's going on.
But anyway, the main takeaway fully survives this criticism. The models appear to systematically think less over time. It doesn't matter if a smarter model might be able to think less for the same quality; this is happening over the same model.