alt Hacker NewsThe gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction.
What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in agent output is working against that goal, not serving it. If they could make it right 100% of the time, they would — and the "slot machine" nonsense disappears entirely. On capped plans, both you and Anthropic are incentivized to minimize interactions, not maximize them. That's the opposite of a casino. It's ... alignment (of a sort)
An unreliable tool that the manufacturer is actively trying to make more reliable is not a slot machine. It's a tool that isn't finished yet.
I've been building a space simulator for longer than some of the people diagnosing me have been programming. I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after.
The pathologizing of "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix" requires you to treat passive consumption as the healthy baseline, which is obviously a claim nobody in this conversation is bothering to defend.
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Right. A platform who makes money the more you have to use it is definitely optimizing to get you the right answer in as few tokens as possible.
There is absolutely no incentive to do that, for any of these companies. The incentive is to make the model just bad enough you keep coming back, but not so bad you go to a competitor.
We've already seen this play out. We know Google made their search results worse to drive up and revenue. Exact same incentives are at play here, only worse.
> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible!
Are you totally sure they are not measuring/optimizing engagement metrics? Because at least I can bet OpenAI is doing that with every product they have to offer.
> The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection.
The analogy was too strained to make sense.
Despite being framed as a helpful plea to gambling addicts, I think it’s clear this post was actually targeted at an anti-LLM audience. It’s supposed to make the reader feel good for choosing not to use them by portraying LLM users as poor gambling addicts.
Doesn't the alignment sort of depend on who is paying for all the tokens?
If Dave the developer is paying, Dave is incentivized to optimize token use along with Anthropic (for the different reasons mentioned).
If the Dave's employer, Earl, is paying and is mostly interested in getting Dave to work more, then what incentive does Dave have to minimize tokens? He's mostly incentivized by Earl to produce more code, and now also by Anthropic's accidentally variable-reward coding system, to code more... ?
At one point, people said Google's optimization target was giving you the right search results as soon as possible. What will prevent Anthropic from falling into the same pattern of enshittification as its predecessors, optimizing for profit like all other businesses?
The LLM is not the slot machine. The LLM is the lever of the slot machine, and the slot machine itself is capitalism. Pull the lever, see if it generates a marketable product or moment of virality, get rich if you hit the jackpot. If not, pull again.
> The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction.
Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior, no matter the optimization target. This applies to Claude