As far as I know they haven't been doing any mass layoffs.
So if Claude Code is writing 90% of the code, then why are they keeping probably the most expensive engineers in the world on the payroll?
The machine writing all the code seems to not be enough, even for the company with access to the best models. What's the alternative to explain this discrepancy?
In this game you "win" only if you arrive first, so keeping the same headcount to run faster is a valid option for Anthropic. In this context "winning" means mainly that we lose our jobs
Honestly that's an interesting statement because in my experience Claude writes around 5-10x more code than a reasonable person would to accomplish the same thing. If you include comments then that number goes way up as well.
Experts need to talk to politicians, but it should be done so through a proper institutional structure (for example a public hearing). Not in private meetings.
What influence groups say to policy makers has to be able to be challenged by opposing interest.
Not only that, but it's important for these advocacy groups to disclose their financing for all to see.
Its always going to be a cat and mouse game because ultimately corporations want to have undue influence over politics, it helps them greatly.
The first stepping stone needs to be to acknowledged that the interests of corporations can and in many cases will be against the interests of the majority of constituents and so we can't allow for our laws and practices to just waver this fact and institutionalise corruption through lobbying.
It's very naive to think consumers and the general population can organise to the effectiveness and level of a corporation. But that doesn't mean people don't care, or don't deserve to have their interests protected.
Their systems aren't going rogue, they're being given bad instructions and poor safeguards.
This is, at this point in time, entirely the fault of OpenAI and one might wonder if there's motives behind this lack of care for safety and brashness.
Although some people say you shouldn't call malice when it could be incompetence. But last I knew, these frontier labs were hiring the best of the best.
You can exclude possibility of incompetence at the frontier labs. Their workers don't have that luxury like Jon Doe to be given doubt about their ability. It's malice or lack of care.
If most of the jobs its creating are related to construction of infrastructure then that's not really positive news as these jobs are temporary, once demand settles then why kind of jobs are going to be created?
It might be benefiting other areas, but I think as the technology improves a lot of those are going to start looking like what's happening in software development (which is arguably what the technology is best at right now).
Most of these jobs are the same jobs that arose thanks to the CHIPS and IRA. Much of the AI boom and trade is building on top of the capex that arose from the semiconductor/hardware portfolio during that era.
Many of the current DCs being built out are also being powered or tied with renewable energy projects that were funded by the IRA, as many DC builders with deep pockets do know the political dimension. If this is what keeps the CHIPS, IRA, and the IIJA alive I'm happy.
Every industry and career type goes through ebbs and flows. The 2010s was a white collar boom, and the 2020s is now a white collar bust. Meanwhile the 2010s was a skilled trades bust and the 2020s is now a skilled trades boom.
Emotions aren't all learned, a lot of it comes wired in us because that's how we relate to others as a species and as animals, in general.
Being angry, being happy, being sad, these are not things we learn. What we learn is how to control the emotions and when it is appropriate to express them.
There's mental disorders of people that don't feel emotions like normal people do, they don't get angry, happy or sad. So what we've learned about these people is that they can mimic the emotions by knowing when it is appropriate and expected to express them. But they don't feel them.
I think the LLMs are closer to psychopaths than to normal children learning the contextual expectations around their emotional responses.
Hah! That's a lot scarier, and seems more plausible in that they lack the chemistry that seems to be the basis of emotions. Also much more fertile ground from which to grow techno-horror stories.
People like to call LLMs 'stochastical parrots' but I see them as the ultimate 'philosophical zombie'.
They are becoming more and more capable of imitating every single nuance of human behaviour yet they lack the neural pathways to connect those thoughts and behaviours with feelings and self-perception; it's blind imitation all the way down.
The process by which a model seems to generate discourse about deep philosophical questions is, in self-aware terms, equivalent to the knee-jerk reflex or the beating of the heart.
>Emotions aren't all learned, a lot of it comes wired in us because that's how we relate to others as a species and as animals, in general.
Yes and no. My understanding is that modern neuroscience is trying to disentangle the raw sensations and contexts from the words we put to them (emotions), kinda like how colors are just wavelengths but we call them different things (like "is my green your green?")
True, but in this context it's worth reminding that LLMs work exclusively from the word descriptions, not having access to the raw sensations.
Everything they learn about emotions is the statistical patterns of how humans react to situations based on their human feelings. There's no direct knowledge from having those feelings themselves.
> Being angry, being happy, being sad, these are not things we learn.
True, but only sort of. You'll have the sensations, but you have to learn to name them of course, and there's more interpretation going on than you might think.
There's a classic psychology study where they gave people niacin and asked them to rate their emotional response to a video. Niacin gives people a flush. Regardless of whether the video was of something that would make you angry or sentimental etc. the people who got niacin reported having a much stronger emotional response - they interpreted the physical cue from the drug as part of their own emotions.
You could do some pretty unethical things with that, it occurs to me. Maybe that was what L. Ron Hubbard was trying with his niacin-based drug addiction therapy.
Even darker, I've read plenty of accounts of people who grew up with abuse who seem to seek out abusive relationships. Sometimes they can even be shockingly upfront about doing so. What if they literally haven't learned the difference between internal cues of arousal from affection and arousal from fear?
Nature v. Nuture. Age long debate, not to be solved here... but an interesting fact about this I heard in a huberman podcast. There are regions in you brain that will only get activated at a certain age (different in men and women) that will impact behavior or reactions to different stimuli. So as much as we think we are in control of our destiny, more is written into our genes than we might want or appreciate.
I've been running my server for about 6 years already, and it's a pretty strong community of around 20 or so people. Sometimes we get new people, not everyone is a perfect fit and they might stay for a few weeks before leaving. Some have left after a few years, some leave and come back; others come every so many months to chat for a day or two before going away.
There's many different types of relationships that can be formed in places like that.
I think what's most important is that there needs to be something you all share for it to work. Maybe it's anime, sports, whatever (in my particular case, it's an LGBT server).
I've already met around 5-6 people from this server IRL, and so far it's always been a great time.
If someone you call a "friend" ditches you just like that. I think maybe you're too quick to call people friends.
Yes, online people can disappear, but I have online friends whom I've been talking to for the past 12 years (basically all the way back to when i returned to the social internet).
It's really all about trust and time, like any other friendship.
There's more to ads than banners and unskippable videos.
I bet if you open YouTube, even with Adblock and sponsorblock, you'll see ads. "Tech" channels are nothing but ads because all they do is present products for people to buy.
Even channels that do legos are ad channels.
YouTube itself has become a platform for serving videos that are advertisement at their core. These videos are popular, get good engagement, pay the content creators and come in cheap for brands. This style of "journalism" extends to many other platforms.
Sponsorblock (FF extension) is neccessary for YouTube, as well as Seal (GUI for yt-dlp) + BravePipe (fork of NewPipe, integrated Sponsorblock) for Android.
Also, adding `Before: YEAR` in search takes you back to a more wholesome time.
Watching Youtube through Brave browser and I can't remember the last time I saw ads (ads by youtube, not by the content creator within the video). Twitch is different story, platform ads certainly play there.
Prior to Brave, ublock origin on Firefox provided a similar ad-free Youtube experience.
I don't consider ad content like the tech channels you mention to be a negative. Informing people about new products is a useful service. The ads that are negative are those that impose themselves over other content or mess with normal internet browsing experience.
Personally I do consider them a negative because they are not really realistic and grounded when giving reviews.
It's a different story if it's a person that's used a device that they bought for a year. But these tech youtubers, they are extremely dependent on a good relationship with the brands because what brings them money is doing the "reviews" on day 1 (if not before) and they can only do that if they have a good standing with the brands. Meaning they will can only talk the product in a way that they know the brand is going to be okay with, mentioning obvious flaws that are easy to disregard ("it's not the best value for the money" is a classic).
This is bad because this type of journalism is constantly moving the window of what's acceptable. Channels that are truly critical (for example gamersnexus) don't get any support from brands. Channels like that are rare, of course, they do exist.
So, to reiterate my point, these channels are not informing: they're selling. There's a really good documentary with Noam Chomsky called "manufacturing consent" that really gives a good overview of this topic. Well, it's about politics, but the same applies for marketing.
So if Claude Code is writing 90% of the code, then why are they keeping probably the most expensive engineers in the world on the payroll?
The machine writing all the code seems to not be enough, even for the company with access to the best models. What's the alternative to explain this discrepancy?
reply