LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.
The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#12> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do…
How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?
That's just it. If they were prioritizing humans they'd have a product with a measely million users, charge more, and offer great support. Their game isn't a good product though, their game is scale because they think that's the only way to win, and winning is the only way to survive.
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#13> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do…
How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?
it's hard, but not THAT hard, to find a few dozen people who can deal with large volumes of support tickets every day. so for a company like anthropic, you'd use a customized claude to triage and then those few dozen people spend all day actually caring about solving users' problems. a contract with fin fka intercom (lol) to offload this is a step in the wrong direction imo, but then nobody pays for support so it's hard to turn it into a revenue stream.
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#14> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do…
> If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.
There is basically no support to speak of. Scaling a zero is not hard. You can be paying 200 USD a month with barely any chance of ever hearing back. Your best chance of getting support from Anthropic is the same as with any other big tech company: have a Twitter following or know someone who works there.
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#15> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do…
Extremely cynical take, but they're probably being honest. They wanna serve humanity. But maybe they only consider a small part of the population to be relevant humans.
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#16Find it surprising that there are people still under the delusion that they have an audience of humans on twitter worth speaking to
Jose valim is the creator of elixir for reference. He definitely includes a fan following within the elixir community. So its not much about twitter as much as the guy.
I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633
> I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir completely disappeared from the top 100 after spending some time in the top 50. People reached out to me and then I reached out to TIOBE to understand why and the reason given was "bad presence on Amazon".
> After further investigation, the root cause seemed to be that we finally had enough published Elixir books. At the time, if you searched for "xyz programming" on Amazon and only found a few results, Amazon would pad those results with non-relevant entries. However, because Elixir reached about 20-30 books, we were no longer padded, so we suddenly got worse rankings than every other language with only a handful of books. This happened on every Amazon domain they searched on, so it compounded and effectively kicked us out of the top 100 altogether. This all happened at a time Elixir language activity had already reached top 25 on GitHub PRs/stars.
So although my comment has gotten a little offtopic but people have literally written books about elixir (the language he created).
My point is, people like to listen to jose and he's a really chill guy from what I know of him and elixir feels like a great language :-D
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?
That's just it. If they were prioritizing humans they'd have a product with a measely million users, charge more, and offer great support. Their game isn't a good product though, their game is scale because they think that's the only way to win, and winning is the only way to survive.
Wait, how would limiting a great tool to 0.1% of the TAM demonstrate caring for humans?
Are you picturing them running a lottery for who’s allowed to use it, or an auction?
And with the loss of scale economies, it would have to be much more expensive.
So you end up charging, what, $10,000/month and only making it available to the very wealthy?
I don’t see how this game plan is better for humans. And I’m honestly not being snarky. Have you thought through how your proposed limits would work? Am I missing something?
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#18It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase.
Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#19LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.
That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.
Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle
#20Find it surprising that there are people still under the delusion that they have an audience of humans on twitter worth speaking to
Jose valim is the creator of elixir for reference. He definitely includes a fan following within the elixir community. So its not much about twitter as much as the guy. I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633 > I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir compl…
That doesn't actually answer the original poster's commentary, however.
Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.
José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).