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Please do not A/B test my workflow

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Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#211

Post by ryandrake »

embedding-shape wrote: post #111
londons_explore wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would be hard pushed to find any big tech company which doesn't do some kind of A B testing. It's pretty much required if you want to build a great product.

Yeah, that's why we didn't have anything anyone could possibly consider as a "great product" until A/B testing existed as a methodology. Or, you could, you know, try to understand your users without experimenting on them, like countless of others have managed to do before, and still shipped "great products".

I know this is a salty take, but reliance on A/B testing to design products is indicative of product deciders who don't know what they are doing and don't know what their product should be. It's like a chef saying, I want to make a pancake, but trying 50 different combinations of ingredients until one of them ends up being a pancake. If you have to test whether a product works / is good / is profitable, then you didn't know what you were doing in the first place.

Using A/B tests to safely deploy and test bug fixes and change requests? Totally different story.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#212

Post by DoctorOetker »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #56
krisbolton wrote: post #37

The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much. I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.

> I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. I disagree in the case of LLMs. AI already has a massive problem in reproducibility and reliability, and AI firms gleefully kick this problem down to the users. "Never trust it's output". It's already enough of a pain in the ass to constrain these systems without the companies s…

Would you have a problem with the following scheme?

Every client is free and encouraged to feed back its financial health: profit for that hour/day/month/...

The AB(-X) test run by the LLM provider uses the correlation of a client's profit with its AB(-X) test, so that participating with the testing improves your profit statistically speaking (sometimes up sometimes down, but on average up).

You may say, what about that hiring decision? One thing is certain: when companies make more profit they are more likely to seek and accept more employees.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#213

Post by mschuster91 »

saltcured wrote: post #189
mschuster91 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much. No. Users aren't free test guinea pigs. A/B testing cannot be done ethically unless you actively point out to users that they are being A/B tested and offering the users a way to opt out, but that in turn ruins a large part of the promise behind A/B tests.

Yeah, and if you don't already have an IRB, your organization probably isn't ready to be doing such things responsibly...

Meta has had an IRB for well over a decade (following a scandal where they used their users as lab rats) and that didn't stop them from doing any of the BS they did ever since.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#214

Post by maleldil »

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #102
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. I disagree in the case of LLMs. AI already has a massive problem in reproducibility and reliability, and AI firms gleefully kick this problem down to the users. "Never trust it's output". It's already enough of a pain in the ass to constrain these systems without the companies s…

Long term effectiveness? LLMs are such a fast moving target. Suppose anthropic reached out to you and gave you a model id you could pin down for the next year to freeze any a/b tests. Would you really want that? Next month a new model could be released to everyone else - or by a competitor - that’s a big step difference in performance in tasks you care about. You’d rather be on your own path learning about the state…

> Suppose anthropic reached out to you and gave you a model id you could pin down for the next year to freeze any a/b tests. Would you really want that?

Yes. I'd like some guarantee that my results are reproducible for some reasonable amount of time. New versions can also introduce regressions. A prompt that works well with today's model might not work with tomorrow's, even if the latter is "better".

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#215

Post by 986aignan »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #212
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. I disagree in the case of LLMs. AI already has a massive problem in reproducibility and reliability, and AI firms gleefully kick this problem down to the users. "Never trust it's output". It's already enough of a pain in the ass to constrain these systems without the companies s…

Would you have a problem with the following scheme? Every client is free and encouraged to feed back its financial health: profit for that hour/day/month/... The AB(-X) test run by the LLM provider uses the correlation of a client's profit with its AB(-X) test, so that participating with the testing improves your profit statistically speaking (sometimes up sometimes down, but on average up). You may say, what about t…

That sounds like a good way to get extreme short-term optimization.

Say a particular finetune prioritizes profits right now and makes recommendations like "cut down on maintenance, you can make up for it later with your increased profits and their interest". It produces more profits, and wins the AB test. Later the chickens come home to roost.

You can reduce the problem by using long-term indicators, but then each AB test is very slow.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#216

Post by doc_ick »

MadnessASAP wrote: post #205
doc_ick wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the TOC?

All TOS essentially boil down to "we owe you nothing and can change the product at anytime to anything we want at our sole discretion" Obviously it would be unreasonable to accept such terms without further context. The further context in this case being that Anthropic will maintain Claude as an AI agent and seek to improve it's performance. What is at the heart of this issue is whether or not Anthropics recent A/B t…

Ultimately that just sounds like within their own TOC, they were just working on getting the best operational results.

If you wanted something more deterministic write it yourself or get it verified, all hosted llms as far as know does neither.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#217

Post by doc_ick »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #197
doc_ick wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the TOC?

Hiding something like this in the TOC rather than explicitly asking users to opt in is a dark pattern. You can't gain the moral highground by cackling that someone should have read the fine print.

This is technology, some politics, capitalism, and math that is trained on curiously gained data, where does non-selfish morality come in?

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#218

Post by doc_ick »

some_random wrote: post #113
doc_ick wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an assistant, answering your question and running some errands for you. If you give it blind permission to do a task, then you’re not worrying about what it does.

That's not what they're doing, they are trying to use plan mode to plan out a task. I don't know where you could have got the idea that they were blindly doing anything.

The plan mode uses sub tasks to read, find, list, or grow out certain information. I would imagine those tasks would be covered by the dubiously discovered a/b testing

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#219

Post by doc_ick »

ramoz wrote: post #75
terralumen wrote: post #68

Curious what the A/B test actually changed -- the article mentions tool confirmation dialogs behaving inconsistently, which lines up with what I noticed last week. Would be nice if Anthropic published a changelog or at least flagged when behavior is being tested.

This stemmed from me asking Claude itself why it was writing such _weird_ plans with no detail (just a bunch of projected code changes). Claude stated: in its system prompt, it had strict instructions to provide no context or details. Keep plans under forty lines of code. Be terse.

This is Claude’s output of its system prompt, can you verify without going Claude of the system prompt? There is still potential of hallucination.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#220

Post by doc_ick »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #26
embedding-shape wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. Luckily, it doesn't seem like any service was reverse-engineered or decompiled here, only a software that lived on the authors disk.

Not "service" in human speech. Service , in bullshit legalese. They define their software as > along with any associated apps, software, and websites (together, our “Services”) As far as I understand, these terms actually hold up in court, too. Which is complete fucking nonsense that, I think, could only be the result of a technologically illiterate class making the decisions. Being penalised for trying to understand…

See John Deere in the US, or Apple, or other fun companies.

I fully agree it’s nonsense, but it’s commonplace.

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