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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

The free market proposition is that competition (especially with Chinese labs and grok) means that Anthropic is welcome to do that. They're even welcome to illegally collude with OpenAi such that ChatGPT is similarly gimped. But switching costs are pretty low. If it turns out I can one shot an issue with Qwen or Deepseek or Kimi thinking, Anthropic loses not just my monthly subscription, but everyone else's I show that too. So no, I think that's some grade A conspiracy theory nonsense you've got there.

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It’s not that crazy. It could even happen by accident in pursuit of another unrelated goal. And if it did, a decent chunk of the tech industry would call it “revealed preference” because usage went up.

LLMs became sycophantic and effusive because those responses were rated higher during RLHF, until it became newsworthy how obviously eager-to-please they got, so yes, being highly factually correct and "intelligent" was already not the only priority.

This is a good point. For example if you have access to a bunch of slot machines, one of them is guaranteed to hit the jackpot. Since switching from one slot machine to another is easy, it is trivial to go from machine to machine until you hit the big bucks. That is why casinos have such large selections of them (for our benefit).

"for our benefit" lol! This is the best description of how we are all interacting with LLMs now. It's not working? Fire up more "agents" ala gas town or whatever

gas is the transaction fees in Ethereum. It's a fitting name.

last time I was at a casino I checked to see what company built the machines, imagine my surprise that it was (by my observation) a single vendor.

> But switching costs are pretty low

Switching costs are currently low. Once you're committed to the workflow the providers will switch to prepaying for a year's worth of tokens.

To be clear I don't think that's what they're doing intentionally. Especially on a subscription basis, they'd rather me maximize my value per token, or just not use them. Lulling users into using tokens unproductively is the worst possible option.

The way agents work right now though just sometimes feels that way; they don't have a good way of saying "You're probably going to have to figure this one out yourself".

As a rational consumer, how would you distinguish between some intentional "keep pulling the slot machine" failure rate and the intrinsic failure rate?

I feel like saying "the market will fix the incentives" handwaves away the lack of information on internals. After all, look at the market response to Google making their search less reliable - sure, an invested nerd might try Kagi, but Google's still the market leader by a long shot.

In a market for lemons, good luck finding a lime.

FWIW, kagi is better than Google

yes, that was their point. Everyone uses Google anyway.

And we all know the market always gives us the best quality product ...

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