alt Hacker NewsSometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop.
Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not.
Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a damn thing. Should I stop fishing?
Obviously no.
So what's the difference? What is the precise mechanism here that you're pointing at? Because sometimes life is disappointing is a reason to do nothing. And yet.
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The timescale is one difference, it's hard to get "sucked in" in the gambling-like mindless state when the timescales are over seasons as opposed to minutes. There's a reason gambling isn't done in a correspondence format.
??? I'm pretty sure you know what the differences are. Go touch grass and tell me it's the same as looking at a plant on a screen.
Dealing with organic and natural systems will, most of the time, have a variable reward. The real issue comes from systems and services designed to only be accessible through intermittent variable rewards.
Oh, and don't confuse Claude's artifacts working most of the time with them actually optimizing to be that way. They're optimizing to ensure token usage. I.E. LLMs have been fine-tuned to default to verbose responses. They are impressive to less experienced developers, often easier to detect certain types of errors (eg. Improper typing), and will make you use more tokens.
It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is.
Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough that you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. That's about as close to a slot machine as I can imagine. Slot rewards are designed to keep you interested as long as possible, on the premise that you _might_ get what you want, the jackpot, if you play long enough.
Anthropic's game isn't limited to a single spin either. The small wins (small prompts with well defined answers) are support for the big losses (trying to one shot a whole production grade program).