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Comment by Neywiny | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's not as nice a story there as he's from India, but outside India people like to talk about their cobra problem and failed solution (retold below). This feels like that. If it's a ticket system, it could close them all as unresovable overnight. If it cares about customer satisfaction, it could give everybody thousand dollar gift cards. Point is, AIs existence is predicated on finding a way to improve its score by any means necessary, and that needs very careful bounding.

I believe it was under British rule, they offered a reward for people bringing in dead cobras as proof of culling. Which worked until people started breeding them just to get the reward. Humans gamed the system and it made the problem worse.

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Sure, incentives can be gamed.

The same oversight mechanism that applies to humans cannot correct the flaws of AI agents? What do you think is the catch?

I am not saying things are clearly defined in most settings. But my accounting agent ( real person) gets paid only when he files my tax returns.

Right, it doesn't work the same for humans as it does AI agents.

If you finetune a model and it starts misbehaving, what are you going to do to it exactly? PIP it? Fire it? Of course not. AIs cannot be managed the same ways as humans (and I would argue that's for the best). Best you can do is try using a different model, but you have no guarantee that whatever issue your model has is actually solved in the new one.

Humans respect the rules because if they don't, then they lose their jobs, can't pay their mortgages, and become homeless. That's quite a powerful incentive not to fudge the numbers too much.

There's no LLM equivalent.

The agent builder loses contract .. Is this not force enough to make AI worthwhile?

Why would the AI care? The agent builder is still asking a non-deterministic black box with no skin in the game to behave a certain way, they have no guarantees.

If the AI is never going to be manageable, never trustable, then the whole idea of agentic systems is dumb.

What is the point of an agent running and you don't trust it?

That would be equivalent to calling this whole AI wave useless. May be it is, maybe it is not.

That's ... how they fundamentally work?

I think it gets more nebulous. For example, does he only get paid if the tax returns are accepted by the government? If they aren't, he's still put in the work. This becomes an extremely slippery slope. A better example is probably retail. In the US at least, places like Walmart and Amazon allow for returns, but they usually just throw it out. That's gotta be built into the price. Meaning, the cheapy no returns accepted online stores are cheaper because the cost for the purchaser isn't tied to satisfaction.

Your accountant has to build in margin that you pay for for clients who stiff him on the bill or who he has to take to court to argue he did the service as described in the contract. If you didn't hold that threshold over his head, he would be able to charge less. Would he? Maybe not, I don't know the guy, but he could.

Understood. So, a better way is to keep him on a retainer? Or let Amazon or Cheaper store do a cost-plus model?

I think that is the core of the argument. It is the risk-sharing between buyer and seller. If sold on outcomes, seller carries all risk. If sold on work-put-in, buyer carries all risk.

Add to that, in some scenarios, outcomes themselves are fuzzy.

Cost plus I'm not sure on. Maybe if your work was in small enough chunks. But if, did example, just generating one response is too expensive, there's no plus, it's just somebody paid $ for some bits in GPU memory and that's likely not useful to anyone.

Yes exactly. Your second paragraph hits the nail on the head. And I'm sure you agree that the AI companies aren't going to take on more risk for free.

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