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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

#111

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

delegate wrote: post #102

It's very tempting to agree to the 'gambling' part, given that both a jackpot and progress towards the goal in your project will give you a hit of dopamine. The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. The situation where this comparison holds is when vibe coding leads nowhere and you don't accompli…

> The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps.

What? Your vibe coded slop is just going to be competing with someone else's vibe coded slop.

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

#112

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #79

This is simply yet another outdated analogy from haters that are failing to keep pace with the current frontier because they are too busy getting high on the anti-hype. We’re well past the need to retry the same prompt multiple times in order to get working code. The models with their harnesses are properly agentic now, they can find the right context, make a plan, write the code, run the tests and fix the bugs with…

> This is simply yet another outdated analogy from haters that are failing to keep pace with the current frontier because they are too busy getting high on the anti-hype.

Touché.

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

#113

Post by cedilla »

samrus wrote: post #76
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! That is a generous interpretation. Mighr be correct. But they dont make as much money if you quickly get the right answer. They make more money if you spend as many tokens as possible being on that "maybe next time" hook. Im not saying theyre actually optimizng for that. But charlie munger said "show me the incentives, and i…

I know for sure that each and every AI I use wants to write whole novellas in response to every prompt unless I carefully remind it to keep responses short over and over and over again.

This didn't used to be the case, so I assume that it must be intentional.

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

#114

Post by askl »

nl wrote: post #108

I don't think gambling is the right analogy at all. I do think it can be addictive, but there are many things that are addictive that aren't gambling. I think a better analogy is something like extreme sport, where people can get addicted to the point it can be harmful.

At least with gambling, there's the chance of hitting a jackpot.

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

#115

Post by RGamma »

Aurornis wrote: post #63
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…

> Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. The majority of us are using their subscription plans with flat rate fees. Their incentive is the precise opposite of what you say. The less we use the product, the more they benefit. It's like a gym membership. I think all of the gambling addiction analogies in this thread are just so strained that I can't take them serio…

And we're still in the expansion phase, so LLM life is actually good... for now.

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

#117

Post by squeefers »

delegate wrote: post #102

It's very tempting to agree to the 'gambling' part, given that both a jackpot and progress towards the goal in your project will give you a hit of dopamine. The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. The situation where this comparison holds is when vibe coding leads nowhere and you don't accompli…

[flagged]

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

#119

Post by lelanthran »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #83
crystal_revenge wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What businesses charge for a product is completely unrelated to what it costs them.

They charge what the market will bear.

If "what the market will bear" is lower than the cost of production then they will stop offering it.

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

#120

Post by shafyy »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #105
Drakim wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is simply not true, token price is largely determined by the token price of their rival services (even before their own operational costs). If everybody else charges about $1 per millions of tokens, then they will also charge about $1 per millions of tokens (or slightly above/below) regardless of how many answers per token they can provide.

It only matters if the rivals have same performance. Opus pricing is 50x Deepseek, and like >100x of small models. It should match rival if the performance is same, and if they can produce model with 10x lower token usage, they can charge 10x. Gemini increased the same Flash's price by something like 5x IIRC when it got better.

I bet that the actual "performance" of all the top-tier providers is so similar, that branding has bigger impact on if you think Claude or ChatGPT peforms better.
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