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The Anthropic Economic Index

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Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#151

Post by FergusArgyll »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #131
groby_b wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is mostly used by software engineers. That's an important distinction to make. I love Claude, but let's not ignore that in the LLM race, they're not exactly the leading player.

Can I ask a dumb question as an LLM newbie? What is it about Claude that makes it so good at basic software engineering tasks? Do you think it was finely tuned to be good at these tasks? No joke/trolling: A bunch of people have posted on HN in the last 6 months about creating MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) -- usually web apps -- using Claude. As a non-web-app programmer, I think this is amazing progress!

This is gonna sound strange but:

Anthropic's llms always (always? at least since 2) have a distinctive "personality". I obv don't know how to quantify it or what "it" really is, but if you've used it you might know what I mean. Maybe that "personality" is conducive to swe?

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#152

Post by falafels »

ryao wrote: post #82

Their promise not to train on the conversations seemed to imply that conversations were private. It is disconcerting that they were not. The extent to which you need to look for loopholes in privacy guarantees these days is amazing.

I listened to an interview a while back with the researchers did this analysis. They developed privacy-preserving techniques, avoiding having to read user conversations directly.

This is Anthropic we're talking about, they're rightly recognized as the 'ethical' AI company.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#153

Post by beefnugs »

alwa wrote: post #129
bufferoverflow wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 35% of a million requests is different than 35% of a billion. Not statistically.

A mentor I respect memorably explained to young me that “it doesn’t matter how big the pot of soup, you can use the same size spoon to taste it.”

Sorry but that mentor has a small practical imagination, a pot can be so large that the top 3 feet that you reach with that spoon could be all oil

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#154

Post by ryao »

falafels wrote: post #152
ryao wrote: post #82

Their promise not to train on the conversations seemed to imply that conversations were private. It is disconcerting that they were not. The extent to which you need to look for loopholes in privacy guarantees these days is amazing.

I listened to an interview a while back with the researchers did this analysis. They developed privacy-preserving techniques, avoiding having to read user conversations directly. This is Anthropic we're talking about, they're rightly recognized as the 'ethical' AI company.

There would be even better privacy if they published the weights so that they could be run by third parties that have no log policies or even better, locally.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#155

Post by olddustytrail »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #126
fragmede wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. reminds me of the ancient okcupid data analysis blogs and not the creepy one by sleep8. The group I'm surprised not to see represented in their analysis is "personal", where people I know use ChatGPT as a therapist/life coach/sms analysis&editor. and of course they crucially but understandably left off the denominator. 35% of a million requests is different than 35% of a billion. and also how many of the conver…

> 35% of a million requests is different than 35% of a billion. Not statistically.

Yes statistically. What do you think "statistically" means?

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#156

Post by lifeisstillgood »

frankfrank13 wrote: post #92

This more or less confirms what I imagine most of us thought, AI is mostly used by engineers, or for engineering tasks. Makes sense, I wonder how much traffic comes from automated tasks (co-pilot, etc). Every time I read a report like this I do wonder if we'll ever see an ROI on LLMs. HUNDREDS of billions of dollars of spend, and 3 years in its still primarily the same crowd using it, and has yet to create a "killer"…

My term for this is “Whitey’s goin’ to the data center”. We are looking at an arms race, where there really is genuine new technology and it will make a difference - but at the 1-2% per annum of an economy level - compounded over fifty years that is geo political dominance yes, but it’s not “machines of loving grace” level growth.

We already have thousands of geniuses working across our economies and teaching our youth. The best of our minds have every year or so been given a global stage in Nobel speeches. We still ignore their arses and will ignore it when AI tells us to stop fighting or whatever.

The real issue here is that wafer scale chips give 900,000 cores, and nothing but embarrassingly parallel code can use it - and frankly no coder I know writes code like that - we have to rethink our whole approach now Moores law is over. Only AI has anything like ability to use the processing ability being built today - the rest of us can stick to cores from 2016 and nothing would change.

Throwing hundreds of billions at having a bad way to program 1 million cores because we have not rethought software and businesses to cope seems wrong - both because “Whitey” can spend it on better things but also because it is an opportunity - imagine being 900,000 times faster than your competitors - what’s does that even mean?

Edit: Trying to put it another way - there are two ways AI can help us - it can improve cancer treatments at every stage of medical care, through careful design and creation of medical AI models that can slowly ratchet up diagnosis, treatment and even research and analysis. This is human organisations harnessing and adapting around a new technology

Or AI can become so smart it just invents a cure for cancer.

I absolutely think the first is going to happen and will benefit the denizens of the first world first. The second one requires two paradigm shifting leaps in the same sentence. Ten years ago I would have laughed in Anthropics face. Today I just give it a low probability multipled by another low probability- and that is an incredible shift.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#157

Post by alwa »

beefnugs wrote: post #153
alwa wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mentor I respect memorably explained to young me that “it doesn’t matter how big the pot of soup, you can use the same size spoon to taste it.”

Sorry but that mentor has a small practical imagination, a pot can be so large that the top 3 feet that you reach with that spoon could be all oil

True! Consistency and representativeness matter, in soup samples as in social samples!

Is the soup smooth or lumpy? Striated or uniform? For that matter a soup could (and often does) involve huge soup bones that give it important parts of its flavor, but never show up directly in a spoonful. And you might need something different from a spoon to convincingly rule out some specific rare lumpy ingredient.

The didactic value of sampling the soup pot goes well behind its basic function: correcting the beginner’s misperception that a sample’s statistical power is directly related to population size :)

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#158

Post by asadotzler »

lblume wrote: post #134
noah_buddy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educate me. I find them useful but they are less so when you try to do something novel. To me, it seems like fancy regurgitation with some novel pattern matching but not quite intuition/reasoning per se. At the base of LLM reasoning and knowledge is a whole corpus of reasoning and knowledge. I am not quite convinced that LLMs will breach the confines of that corpus and the logical implications of the data there. No “…

Let's say I can't fully disclose the details because it is an area I am actively working on, but I had an algorithmical problem that was already solved in an ancient paper, but after a few hours of research I could find no open implementation of it anywhere. I thus spent quite some time re-implementing this algorithm from scratch, but it kept failing in quite a few edge cases that should have been covered by the orig…

clearly NOT novel as you so clearly explained, "an algorithmical problem that was already solved in an ancient paper"

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#159

Post by asadotzler »

cma wrote: post #33
vonneumannstan wrote: post #23

Its a public benefit research company. Expecting it to behave like a normal Corporation is missing the point...

It's nice that their public benefit charter terms are actually public unlike Blue Sky's, where bsky can have anything in there even just minor benefits stuff and still be pretty much a normal corporation.

B corps are normal corporations.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#160

Post by james_marks »

lblume wrote: post #134
noah_buddy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educate me. I find them useful but they are less so when you try to do something novel. To me, it seems like fancy regurgitation with some novel pattern matching but not quite intuition/reasoning per se. At the base of LLM reasoning and knowledge is a whole corpus of reasoning and knowledge. I am not quite convinced that LLMs will breach the confines of that corpus and the logical implications of the data there. No “…

Let's say I can't fully disclose the details because it is an area I am actively working on, but I had an algorithmical problem that was already solved in an ancient paper, but after a few hours of research I could find no open implementation of it anywhere. I thus spent quite some time re-implementing this algorithm from scratch, but it kept failing in quite a few edge cases that should have been covered by the orig…

This fits my experience. When the information is encoded somehow already, LLM’s excel at translating to another medium.

Combined with the old “nothing new under the Sun” maxim, in that most ideas are re-hashes or new combinations of existing ideas, and you’ve got a changed landscape.

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