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Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

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Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#101

Post by moomoo11 »

sshine wrote: post #98
moomoo11 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the best LLM can't even process a 50 line CSV with like 2+ columns properly.

LLMs make counting mistakes like forgetting the number of columns halfway through. I won't say "much like humans", since that will probably trigger some. But the general tendency for LLMs to be "bad at counting" (this includes computing) is resolved by producing programs that do the counting, and executing those programs instead. The LLMs that do that today are called agentic.

Right. Except those agents are not working as expected in many cases when the files become more complicated.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#102

Post by sshine »

moomoo11 wrote: post #101
sshine wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs make counting mistakes like forgetting the number of columns halfway through. I won't say "much like humans", since that will probably trigger some. But the general tendency for LLMs to be "bad at counting" (this includes computing) is resolved by producing programs that do the counting, and executing those programs instead. The LLMs that do that today are called agentic.

Right. Except those agents are not working as expected in many cases when the files become more complicated.

I haven't tried working with very large files.

But Claude Code does read the entire file when it reads or writes anything.

Humans don't do anything close to that when the files get big.

So presumably what LLMs need is a finer context granularity than per-file.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#103

Post by sshine »

moomoo11 wrote: post #92
andai wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most LLMs I use would respond to this by writing a Python program to run the query.

And that program would be written different each time and sometimes fail.

...and the LLM, given an agentic loop, would ingest its own error message and correct itself...

...and eventually it'd persist some knowledge in a context window to not make that mistake for a while...

...and then it'd forget and make the same mistake again...

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#104

Post by moomoo11 »

sshine wrote: post #103
moomoo11 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that program would be written different each time and sometimes fail.

...and the LLM, given an agentic loop, would ingest its own error message and correct itself... ...and eventually it'd persist some knowledge in a context window to not make that mistake for a while... ...and then it'd forget and make the same mistake again...

exactly

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#105

Post by int_19h »

kadushka wrote: post #91
int_19h wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying taxes is not voluntary, unlike business deals.

Living in US is voluntary.

For large swaths of the population it is not. Moving is expensive, for one. Obtaining a citizenship elsewhere is non-trivial (and often also expensive). There are non-monetary costs as well, like having to leave your friends and extended family behind.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#106

Post by int_19h »

kadushka wrote: post #89
int_19h wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these things is that they allow humans to pretend that they are not responsible for those decisions, because "computer told me to do so". At the same time, the humans who are training those systems can also pretend to not be responsible because they are just making a thing that provides "suggestions" to humans making the ultimate decision. Again, look at what's happening in Gaza right now for a good…

With self-driving cars some human will be held responsible in case of the accident, I hope. Why would it be different here? It seems like a responsibility problem, not a technology one.

I'm not talking about matter of formal responsibility here, especially since the enforcing mechanisms for stuff like war crimes are very poor due to the lack of a single global authority capable of enforcing them (see the ongoing ICC saga). It's about whether people feel personally responsible. AI provides a way to diffuse and redirect this moral responsibility that might otherwise deter them.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#107

Post by FredPret »

treetalker wrote: post #93
FredPret wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this line of thinking, but I also think it's impossible to have a complex system that is universally acknowledged to "work". In Minsky's Society of Mind, he describes a mind made up of layers of agents. The agents have similar cognitive capacity. Lower-level agents are close to the detail but can't fit overall picture into their context. Higher-level ones that can see the overall picture but all the deta…

It's true: I/we haven't decided what "works" means. I've been meaning to read that book; I haven't yet, so I'm not in a position to evaluate its argument. But the argument as you describe it makes intuitive sense, and I would agree that the hypothetical mind would be at least analogous to national politics. Suppose "works" means that the majority of citizens (lower-level agents?) may readily implement its collective…

It's a great book!

The question of what "works" will probably never be settled since any decision, even a globally optimal one, will probably leave some of the agents worse off than they could have been under some other regime.

But I do expect this question to become less and less emotionally relevant as prosperity continues to increase exponentially for the bulk of the agents in the system. The rising tide of technology-enabled economic growth lifts all ships, even imperfect systems or unlucky agents.

Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense

#108

Post by moomoo11 »

sshine wrote: post #102
moomoo11 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Except those agents are not working as expected in many cases when the files become more complicated.

I haven't tried working with very large files. But Claude Code does read the entire file when it reads or writes anything. Humans don't do anything close to that when the files get big. So presumably what LLMs need is a finer context granularity than per-file.

The promise is that we can automate work.

The reality is that for any meaningful work automation, the currently available tooling is not meeting that expectation.

And 99% of us do not have the capabilities nor knowledge to build these SOTA models which is why A. we are not at OpenAI making 10M+ TC and B. We are application developers who are using off the shelf technology to build products and services.

As such, we have real world experience with these technologies.

BTW I use AI heavily every day in cursor and whatever else.

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