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"Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

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Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#81

Post by bandrami »

ctoth wrote: post #11

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. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in…

> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible!

Wait, what? Anthropic makes money by getting you to buy and expend tokens. The last thing they want is for you to get the right answer as fast as possible. They want you to sometimes get the right answer unpredictably, but with enough likelihood that this time will work that you keep hitting Enter.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#82

Post by crystal_revenge »

ctoth wrote: post #11

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. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in…

> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible!

What makes you believe this? The current trend in all major providers seem to be: get you to spin up as many agents as possible so that you can get billed more and their number of requests goes up.

> Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design

LLMs by all major providers are optimized used RLHF where they are optimized in ways we don't entirely understand to keep you engaged.

These are incredibly naive assumptions. Anthropic/OpenAI/etc don't care if you get your "answer solved quickly", they care that you keep paying and that all their numbers go up. They aren't doing this as a favor to you and there's no reason to believe that these systems are optimized in your interest.

> I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after.

The core argument of the "gambling hypothesis" is that many of these people aren't really building things. To be clear, I certainly don't know if this is true of you in particular, it probably isn't. But just because this doesn't apply to you specifically doesn't mean it's not a solid argument.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#83

Post by YetAnotherNick »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #82
ctoth wrote: post #11

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. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in…

> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! What makes you believe this? The current trend in all major providers seem to be: get you to spin up as many agents as possible so that you can get billed more and their number of requests goes up. > Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design LLMs by all major providers are optimized used RLHF where they are opti…

Bill is unrelated to their cost. If they can produce answer in 1/10th of the token, they can charge 10x more per token, likely even more.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#85

Post by energy123 »

simonw wrote: post #2

I know it's popular comparing coding agents to slot machines right now, but the comparison doesn't entirely hold for me. It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. (I saw "no actual evidence pointing to these improvements" with a footnote and didn't even need to click that footnote to know it was the METR thing. I wish AI holdouts would find a few mo…

Being on a $200 plan is a weird motivator. Seeing the unused weekly limit for codex and the clock ticking down, and knowing I can spam GPT 5.2 Pro "for free" because I already paid for it.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#86

Post by tsimionescu »

pixl97 wrote: post #33
roblh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. I mean this only works if Anthropic is the only game in town. In your analogy if anyone else builds a casino with a higher payout then they lose the game. With the rate of LLM improvement over the years, this doesn't seem like a stable means of business.

While I don't know if this applies to AI usage, but actual gambling addicts most certainly do not shop around for the best possible rewards: they stick more or less to the place they got addicted at initially. Not to mention, there's plenty of people addicted to "casinos" that give 0 monetary rewards, such as Candy Crush or Farmville back in the day and Genshin Impact or other gacha games today.

So, if there's a way to get people addicted to AI conversations, that's an excellent way to make money even if you are way behind your competitors, as addicted buyers are much more loyal that other clients.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#87

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Rather than let results be random, iteratively and continuously add more and more guardrails and grounding.

Tests, linting, guidance in response to key events (Claude Code hooks are great for this), automatically passing the agent’s code plan to another model invocation then passing back whatever feedback that model has on the plan so you don’t have to point out the same flaws in plans over and over.. custom scripts that iterate your codebase for antipatterns (they can walk the AST or be regex based - ask your agent to write them!)

Codify everything you’re looping back to your agent about and make it a guardrail. Give your agent the tools it needs to give itself grounding.

An agent without guardrails or grounding is like a person unconnected to their senses: disconnected from the world, all you do is dream - in a dream anything can happen, there’s nothing to ensure realism. When you look at it that way it’s a miracle coding agents produce anything useful at all :)

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#88

Post by materielle »

eaglelamp wrote: post #73
ctoth wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please go read how the Anthropic max plan works. IF I USE LESS TOKENS, ANTHROPIC GETS MORE MONEY! You are blindly pattern matching to "corporation bad!" without actually considering the underlying structure of the situation. I believe there's a phrase for this to do with probabilistic avians?

As an investor in Anthropic which pricing strategy would you support? That's the question you need to ask, not what there current pricing strategy in the win the market phase happens to be.

It’s sort of surprising how naive developers still are given the countless rug pulls over the past decade or two.

You’re right on the money: the important thing to look at are the incentive structures.

Basically all tech companies from the post-great financial crisis expansion (Google, post Balmer Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etc) started off user-friendly but all eventually converged towards their investment incentive structure.

One big exception is Wikipedia. Not surprising since it has a completely different funding model!

I’m sure Anthropic is super user friendly now, while they are focused on expansion and founding devs still have concentrated policial sway. It will eventually converge on its incentive structures to extract profit for shareholders like all other companies.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#89

Post by zem »

simonw wrote: post #2

I know it's popular comparing coding agents to slot machines right now, but the comparison doesn't entirely hold for me. It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. (I saw "no actual evidence pointing to these improvements" with a footnote and didn't even need to click that footnote to know it was the METR thing. I wish AI holdouts would find a few mo…

thanks, that steve yegge piece was a very good read.
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