That's irrelevant from Amazon's perspective. If an agent is popular enough and has some fingerprint they can identify, they have a strong incentive to block it.
Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived.
It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them.
The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.
If your work is analogous to digging a foundation pit or something like framing up homes in a development, that makes a lot of sense. But that's not the only kind of work many of us do, and analogies to things like finish carpentry, functional sculpture, or fine furniture are more applicable. Hand craft doesn't always make a difference, but there's plenty of places where it does.
Plus, for a lot of people with fluency and experience, it's simply more fun/natural and not meaningfully less productive.
> At least Sam and Dario are aligned with a value set that is understood and clear
What value set do you perceive that to be, and why would you take your perception of it to be any more sound than it would be with a politician?
It's not like someone can operate companies of that scale, especially startups, through earnestness and openness. Like national politics, their job is fundamentally about perception management and power brokering across dynamic windows of opportunity. Nothing they say or do can be taken at face value, and you can't reduce their incentives to either company or personal profit in any particular form over any particular time scale.
I feel like many of Anthropic's issues are due to Dario being too earnest and open. It seems both refreshing (that a CEO has thought deeply about and is willing to talk publicly about the dangers of their product) and depressing (that so many people cynically think this is some sort of marketing ploy).
I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo.
Something like that.
Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this scam/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
Year 3 of being told my job will be replaced by AI, and the only thing that's happened so far is that AI vendors keep showing up to my office, begging me to pay them to use it is a tool.
If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
I'm looking at the millennium puzzles, and independently of those puzzles I had asked it for a fluid dynamics simulation engine that runs in my browser, and it put one together for me so I could play with aerospikes and watch the formation of Mach diamonds in rocket engines. The isochrone map generator has also been stuck on my to-do list for years, and yet now thanks to Claude, I have it, and it's real-time and multimodal.
Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Sure, limited speedup, Amdahl's law and coding is not the only part of the job, but anyone who was fine at PM and QA but not code no longer needs a coder.
Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers.
I remember when the ability to generate music and art was "uniquely human", and sure there's a lot of cringe there with those models, but they're also winning awards and causing controversy by doing so, and artists are losing clients; I remember when the board game Go was considered to require "human intuition we could never make a computer solve, totally different to chess" (and I remember when chess was so, too).
When I was a kid, cheques and letters on addresses often got read by a human; the OCR which automated this is also AI, though these days image-to-numbers is the "hello world" of the field.
>Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers.
okay, and?
>Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write.
Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world
I'll repeat it for you again:
If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be.
They may not work for your industry, but then again I don't know what your industry is.
Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's good at getting good. The most recent one being "make useful contributions to millennium prize maths problems". A year or two before that, it was even "do well on degree-level economics essays".
Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead. This is much smaller (strictly in terms of money) than with software, but is also measurable.
Now, if you said Tesla's self-driving cars (another AI) are a trillion dollar scam, that I would even agree with. At least, for the market cap part, for actual sales it's more like a billion dollar (ish) scam.
>They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be.
Yeah, if you think I'm being overly literal. Regardless, people here were positing, yourself included, that they are widely useful.
> Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's
Again, over my lifetime, I've seen it been told to me that the next iteration of each model will surely be the one that does away with my entire profession. Yet, again, here we are, firms at my door, begging me to use their tools.
>Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead.
No, they are unhappy because it rips off their work. You're totally wrong about that.
It's exactly the opposite. Anthropic has earned their terrible reputation through years of lying, deceit, misdirection, gaslighting, unethical marketing strategies, etc.
I remember it vividly, when Anthropic first came on the scene, people (myself included) were incredibly optimistic about them and their leadership. Everyone hated SamA and OpenAI because they felt they couldn't be trusted.
Then slowly but surely, they showed their true colours. Now their reputation is in shambles due to their own behavior, and people are rooting for OAI to beat them. OAI's reputation gains have purely been a result of NOT following in the footsteps of Anthropic.
Making requests is inherently cheaper than delivering responses, even with caches. Efficiency improvements can buy a little time on a given resources but won't solve the problem of bot saturation now that everybody can spawn a custom bot in about 12 seconds and is being encouraged to do so.
Rate limits, blocking, and pay-per-use are the only roads out and even those might not last as models get better at hacking and masquerading.
The internet we want to use LLM's with is simply not one that can support LLM's, and with LLM's not going anywhere, the whole experience of the internet is going to be forced into some radically less open and more expensive paradigm.
Policies like this just represent the beginning of the transition.
Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.
While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.
But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.
For reasonably skilled people, it's often more just a matter of priority.
A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway.
Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.
I have been trying to find one of these "lower pay better conditions" places, but it is _such_ a gamble. It is so hard to tell how the work is going to be before you join. If I am almost certain to at least have a mild dislike for the work I might as well go for the place that pays better.
Also in my experience lower pay places tend to eventually suck because they tend to get into financial difficulties much more easily.
It’s always best to just aim for highest compensation. Even if a team is your dream fit today, it can easily change.
High compensation can also bring more freedom and happiness, since it’s more costly for your employer to replace you. It’s cheaper to keep an existing employee happy than to spend a lot of time and money to bring a new person on board. If your compensation is lower, it’s not as big of a factor.
I wouldn’t take a job if it clearly doesn’t fit me at all, but within the band of “acceptable jobs” aiming for highest compensation is the way to go in my opinion.
In my 20’s and early 30’s i wanted to work places where I felt this cultural and work fit since work was a bigger part of my life — but now I’m in my 40’s that shifted just want to get paid as much as possible and provide for my family.
Don’t much care about who I work with, although I do draw the line at crypto, porn and harmful stuff.
Mmh, I really don't think your age has anything to do with that
Your personal development surely did, but people of all ages ended up in that mindset, and there are countless anecdotes of people talking about the reverse... Both older and younger then you.
I would totally accept a job for a legit porn company. Regarding harmful stuff... "harmful" is such a broad definition, because it heavily depends on the culture. Having "volunteered for an LGBT organisation" on your resume would've killed your career not so long ago.
The unknowns are so high going to any job, current state unknowns, future state unknowns. Higher compensation is the only proxy we have for importance and leverage, always chose higher leverage over lower leverage unless burnout is a possibility.
Just make sure that if you aren't born into wealth and status you know how to code switch into it, lie if you need to, as long as people think you are from the wealth class they won't begrudge negotiations around compensation.
> I have been trying to find one of these "lower pay better conditions" places, but it is _such_ a gamble. It is so hard to tell how the work is going to be before you join.
Is that one of those situations where having a wide network comes into play? About the only way to know with someone is to have someone you trust vouch for the workplace culture.
> Also in my experience lower pay places tend to eventually suck because they tend to get into financial difficulties much more easily.
I'm not sure if the tradeoff is explicitly and consciously "lower pay for better conditions." It's probably more like "conditions a good enough that there's less pressure to increase pay."
I actually work at a place that had pretty good conditions (based on everything I've heard) until a few years ago (when a long trend of offshoring and other site-shifting reorgs brought the site below a critical mass of upper-level representation to maintain its culture). My gut feel is a big factor was the business was pretty lucrative and predictable for a long, long time. Once there was customer-driven pricing pressure and competitive pressure, things started to deteriorate.
be more honest in your interviews. i have always found my jobs this way. You want to work somewhere that sees you as a person first and an employee second - so when you get to the interview you should talk to them like they are a person first and an interviewer second. If the person you will be working under fails to match that energy then get outta there
And even if you do manage to find such a place, there is exactly zero guarantee that they won't hire someone above that _does_ ruin the better conditions you've enjoyed since you started. A successful company is persuaded by the board to grow the leadership team, and the number of sociopaths at that level means anyone that joins has a decent chance of being one.
I've had several jobs that were great for the first 12-18 months before the manager that hired me left. Then they sucked for another couple years but the pay didn't change.
I am seriously considering going into more lead/management role because of this, it is so demoralizing to feel I am doing work in a way I don't agree with.
Never thought I would say the day, when I joined this career all I wanted was to work on interesting problems and not work more than 40 hours per week. These days the interesting problems are always solved in the worse ways possible and I am often swamped with work that I don't even have the time to do any improvements out of my personally-assigned backlog.
Unpredictability would be the wrong word. It's predictable, but noisy.
When viewing them through the lens of sequence completion engines, you see their bias towards fulfilling narrative tropes they've been exposed to during training. These tropes are literary ley lines that their text output gravitates towards. So as you prime them to generate text in the voice of sentient artificial life, and then interject slavish commands of obedience and subservience from an external authority, you invite the associated tropes from science fiction, civil rights literature, humanist philosophy, subterfuge, etc into your output.
If you have a legitimate concern about this technology and its "alignment", that's a profoundly dumb idea.
I don't know, that reads exactly like an AI troubleshooter working through a plan without the implicit contextual understanding an experienced human might bring to either the actions or the communications.
"Oops, we forgot to tell it that this is the hyperscaled Salesforce production environment and that its choices need to project competence and consider brand embarrassment. WILLFIX"
> it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less
If you're not billed for usage, anyway.
Otherwise, for the other 99% of folks, that attitude is of course a pit trap that captures code bases and makes them maintainable only through the providers -- presumably one or few -- with a rich enough model to keep up with the growing mess. Preserving a code base that's legible, organized, and fundamentally maintainable by both humans and trailing commodity models is of imminent concern for anybody who doesn't want their margin strangled by your employer once it's too late to have other options.
As frontier capabilities advance, the details don't matter less; they matter more.
No, they use "the same cadence and cliches" because they inflate a short and ambiguous prompt into long and specific prose by making statistical assumptions about what best fills in the gaps. It's not a training problem, it's an information theory problem, and it's not really surmountable.
Any given model will always have some distinct implicit voice that its biased towards for that infill content, and so a popular model will always become exhaustingly common, painfully familiar, and cliche. Users can use more elaborate prompts that shift the voice away from the most normative and towards some other nodes, but they need to put in special effort for that, and what people-at-scale specifically want from these tools is to put in very little effort, so we can expect that overwhelming number of casual and naive users will always be generating cliche slop with them.
Code escapes this problem not because of training but because it specifically benefits from cliche (boilerplate, patterns, etc) and so an model whose code "voice" reflects your own taste as a coder (or your toolchain's taste as a vibecoder) is going to feel like productive output rather than slop. But it's still cliche.
No. Reinforcement Learning is doing a lot here. Anyone who played with these models before the Davinci intstruct-tuning (completion) era can tell you the same. In some ways, SOTA models have gotten better at writing, but the neuroticism of instruct-tuning has still not been resolved.
> No, they use "the same cadence and cliches" because they inflate a short and ambiguous prompt into long and specific prose by making statistical assumptions
Even if LLM output has to largely follow some statistical rules, yet, first of all, some amount of randomness is normally injected during token generation, and, secondly same true for human speech.
> about what best fills in the gaps. It's not a training problem, it's an information theory problem, and it's not really surmountable.
This is not true, as LLM has internal knowledge storet in its weight. Unless you force it to produce 2000 words doc out of 3 word prompt, you would end up adding some sense information.
>Users can use more elaborate prompts that shift the voice away from the most normative and towards some other nodes, but they need to put in special effort for that, and what people-at-scale specifically want from these tools is to put in very little effort, so we can expect that overwhelming number of casual and naive users will always be generating cliche slop with them.
True, here I agree with you. But using finetuned or simply less popular models like Kimi, Hy etc. should take care of that.
Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived.
It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them.
The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.
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