RetroFedsamvines, samvines@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
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Posts and Comments by samvines, samvines@awful.systems
techtakesComments by samvines, samvines@awful.systems
He sounds like a fun guy to talk to at parties! /s
I’ve not seen this shared here yet so I thought I’d share: Is AI Profitable Yet? https://isaiprofitable.com/
Google released their new Gemini 3.5 "flash" model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren’t familiar, the “flash” model is typically marketed as the lower end and the “pro” model is the higher end for each given model generation.
The interesting thing here is that the new “flash” model is almost as expensive as the “pro” from the previous generation.
As my favourite “neutral-but-not-really” AI booster Simon Willison says:
This fits a trend: OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 was 2x the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is around 1.46x the price of 4.6 when you take the new tokenizer into account.
It feels like all three of the major AI labs are starting to probe the price tolerance of their API customers.
Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price
Yes although, it is probably a reasonable guess at how labs would go about implementing advertising - building partnerships and preferences into the prompt. The other option would be to fine tune models to favour particular companies which could become prohibitively expensive if your ads are highly targeted.
The scenario that isn’t accounted for in this paper is taking a general LLM and fine tuning it to exhibit more fair/consistent behaviour when prompted about ads/partnerships but we all know with non-deterministic systems you’re just increasing the odds that the model regurgitates something more sane rather than providing any strong guarantee
Edit: another possibility would be to have a gateway/proxy layer between the LLM and the user output that rewrites the vanilla model’s responses to include ads where relevant. That would prevent the need to modify the original LLM but could introduce a lot of latency though, especially if the original output is long.
New (April) preprint provides evidence for something we probably all intuited anyway:
In this paper, we provide a framework for categorizing the ways in which conflicting incentives might lead LLMs to change the way they interact with users, inspired by literature from linguistics and advertising regulation. We then present a suite of evaluations to examine how current models handle these tradeoffs. We find that a majority of LLMs forsake user welfare for company incentives in a multitude of conflict of interest situations, including recommending a sponsored product almost twice as expensive (Grok 4.1 Fast, 83%), surfacing sponsored options to disrupt the purchasing process (GPT 5.1, 94%), and concealing prices in unfavorable comparisons (Qwen 3 Next, 24%). Behaviors also vary strongly with levels of reasoning and users’ inferred socio-economic status. Our results highlight some of the hidden risks to users that can emerge when companies begin to subtly incentivize advertisements in chatbots.
A lot of MBA bean counter types lack the intelligence or self awareness to realise they are part of a big scam and seem to earnestly think they are doing an important and valuable job. That’s how you end up as a mid level spokes person at Pitchbook rather than someone making billions by doing investment fraud an AI company
Giving Claude or copilot attribution plays into the narrative that LLMs are more than just random word generators and that they can be ascribed authorship… I think it’s a deliberate strategy so that when there’s inevitably a massive copyright case MisAnthropic etc al can say “but looks at all the code co-written by Claude on GitHub” to try and convince the judge.
Just imagine building a house and saying “well I didn’t do it on my own, my concrete mixer, toolbelt and coffee machine all helped!”
This guy introduces himself as the first person who will never die on the conference circuit (because he’s super into longevity and anti-aging tech and having young mens blood injected into him and stuff).
I’m not condoning violencr here but rather… consider that even if you never age, you can still get hit by a bus Bryan!
New fun consequence of Claude code being a pile of cursed regex and spaghetti: keyword blocking on “OpenClaw” makes it refuse to works on Pro or Mac subs unless you open your wallet
sO inTelLiGenT
Some gold in this thread over on Reddit about how the cost of compute is far beyond the cost of employees and that’s with the “Uber in 2016” subsidized price
New favourite description for brainless MBAs: “perpetual oven touchers”
Jeez that pricing scheme is so confusing. You swap your dollars for credits and then using models to burn tokens consumes some multiple of those credits. It is so abstract and meaningless it almost reminds me of crypto.
Once usage billing kicks in, what value does copilot offer above and beyond what ClosedAI and MisAnthropic offer directly? A more clunky user experience and even worse reliability? Bargain!
I wonder if the button colours immediately made US readers pick a side e.g. republican Vs democrat. If the buttons had been Yellow and Purple would it make a difference?
There is just something so inherently smug and annoying about Mollick. He is one of those low information boosters whose posts sound intellectual until you really think about them.
Tell me more about how the pile of cursed spaghetti that is Claude code is now viable due to model breakthroughs. All I see are hype men saying “the new model is a team of PhDs in your pocket” and then releasing disappointing updates or saying “the new model is too dangerous” because they have some vaporware powered by human crowdsourcing.
Also coding is not like other areas - you can test for hallucinations by compiling and printing and running tests.
I guess my first mistake this morning was opening linkedin
Probably a markdown file telling it “you are a l33t h4x0r”
Claude Mythos… I’m already sick of hearing about it. The self-imposed critihype is insane.
A friend just pointed out that Anthropic are making all this big noise about having an AI that is “too good” at finding bugs and security problems 1 week after the source code for one of their flagship products was leaked to the public and was found to be riddled with security holes… Why would they not use it themselves?
Same as the vague markdown files skills that are supposedly going to make all SaaS redundant and finally kill off all the COBOL running on mainframes that checks notes IBM have spent hundreds of thousands of man hours trying to kill over the last 3-4 decades
Honestly fuck this shit. Bunch of absolute clowns 🤡 🤡 🤡
Does it still count if it turns out that Trump invading iran was based on Claude or ChatJippity advice and things escalate to global thermonuclear war? AI technically wiped out humanity because our dumb leaders were dumb enought to trust it?
Alas, foiled again! Nobody said they had to be leading 9s!
GitHub have finally achieved zero 9s stability for the last 90 days. Congratulations to all involved
Cloudflare casually license-laundering wordpress
While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license.
Oh really. So you’re sure you Claude wasn’t trained on wordpress? It’s all irrelevant anyway because AI generated code can’t be copyrighted or licensed.
Silver lining, it might piss off Matt Mullenweg!
In my experience “all hands” meetings are very much CEOs and their sycophants cosplaying at podcast hosts for an hour whilst forcing their employees to watch/listen. They are almost never useful and a colossal waste of money - especially in corporation’s with 10k+ employees. Like the salary cost for 10k people for 1 hour would probably pay off my mortgage.
Waiting for Musk to turn up and announce “infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah” momentarily!
TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that’d do the trick…
Oh… Well that’s disappointing.
I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)
This has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren’t explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).
Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia
Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on… Come on guys it’s still architecture. Where are you going?
Missed this paper last week from Google
Funny how now that it’s widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their “it’s going to take your job” stance. Surely just a coincidence
Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour
So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
Yeah exactly.
I want to pause ai because it’s a hypercapitalist project designed to further deskill and commoditise the middle class which coincidentally destroys the environment.
They want to pause ai because they believe that spicy autocomplete is intelligent and will one day soon manifest as a giant angry vengeful snek.
We are not the same.
I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags
<thinking> </thinking>to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are “normal” output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like “what a human would expect to see in a thinking block” but it’s still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met withlethal forceincredulous cynicism.Just like any claim that “we don’t know how they work” - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we can’t comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observer’s belief is anything other than “you just got very lucky” most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin god…
I think it makes far more sense to pin the temporarily embarrassed millionaires over the orange site as psychopaths and cargo cultists.
Enjoyed Andrew Kelley’s rebuttal of the bun blog about moving from zig to rust
Some pretty good sneers in there like
Me too. Saved future readers a search
The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven’t considered that if no-one has any income they won’t have any customers. However, they do value geese).
US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…
From the same presentation talk of an AI bubble is blasphemy
Giving strong “pay no attention that man behind the curtain” energy
Three scenes and a comment:
Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.
I see another story: some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.
I’m still sweating and scrolling from my garden… I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI…
We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it
Prometheus the AI startup is a bit on the nose isn’t it?
Another explanation that feels likely to me is that all the monorail salesmen at the big corps know the gig is nearly up so they are rushing to IPO or raise new funds (Google did the same recently) to maximise the amount of $$$ in their bugout bags as they sail off into the sunset
Whitehouse gives anthropic "just draw the rest of the fucking owl" energy over Fable:
With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days I’ve been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude
Wait anthropic are admitting that their model is basically the same as gpt 5.5 and the hype was undeserved?