alt Hacker News> To claim to know a company's strategy as an outsider is messy stuff.
I said "it seems like". Obviously, I have no idea whether this is an intentional strategy or not and it could as well be a side effect of those things that you mentioned.
Models being "worse" is the perceived effect for the end user (subjectively, it seems like the price to achieve the same results on similar tasks with Opus has been steadily increasing). I am claiming that there is no incentive for Anthropic to address this issue because of their business model (maximize the amount of tokens spent and price per token).
>>> ... but it seems like Anthropic is going for the Tinder/casino intermittent reinforcement strategy: optimized to keep you spending tokens instead of achieving results.
>> This part of the above comment strikes me as uncharitable and overconfident. And, to be blunt, presumptuous. To claim to know a company's strategy as an outsider is messy stuff.
> I said "it seems like".
Sorry. I take back the "presumptuous" part. But part of my concern remains: of all the things you chose to wrote, you only mentioned "the Tinder/casino intermittent reinforcement strategy". That phrase is going to draw eyeballs, and you got mine at least. As a reader, it conveys you think it is the most likely explanation. I'm trying to see if there is something there that I'm missing. How likely do you think is? Do you think it is more likely than the other three I mentioned? If so, it seems like your thinking hinges on this:
> I am claiming that there is no incentive for Anthropic to address this issue because of their business model (maximize the amount of tokens spent and price per token).
No incentive? Hardly. First, Anthropic is not a typical profit-maximizing entity, it a Public Benefit Corporation [1] [2]. Yes, profits matter still, but there are other factors to consider if we want to accurately predict their actions.
Second, even if profit maximization is the only incentive in play, profit-maximizing entities can plan across different time horizons. Like I mentioned in my above comment, it would be rather myopic to damage their reputation with a strategy that I summarize as a short-term customer-squeeze strategy.
Third, like many people here on HN, I've lived in the Bay Area, and I have first-degree connections that give me high confidence (P>80%) that key leaders at Anthropic have motivations that go much beyond mere profit maximization.
A\'s AI safety mission is a huge factor and not the PR veneer that pessimists tend to claim. Most people who know me would view me as somewhat pessimistic and anti-corporate and P(doomy). I say this to emphasize I'm not just casting stones at people for "being negative". IMO, failing to recognize and account for Anthropic's AI safety stance isn't "informed hard-hitting pessimism" so much as "limited awareness and/or poor analysis".
I'm not naive. That safety mission collides in a complicated way with FU money potential. Still, I'm confident (P>60%) that a significant number (>20%) of people at Anthropic have recently "cerebrated bad times" [3] i.e. cogitated futures where most humans die or lose control due to AI within ~10 to ~20 years. Being filthy rich doesn't matter much when dead or dehumanized.
[1]: https://law.justia.com/codes/delaware/title-8/chapter-1/subc...
[2]: https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...
[3]: Weird Al: please make "Cerebration" for us.