I think it's often entirely reasonable to shed one's empathy for someone who displays no empathy for people like you. Tit-for-tat isn't always the best policy, but it's not psychopathic either.
A considerable portion of the AI-girl rhetoric quoted in the article is specifically denigrating liberals. It would be very generous and possibly laudable of liberals to nevertheless feel empathy for the people falling for it, but I think it's pretty understandable if most don't. And I'm not even convinced it's laudable; there's a particular tendency in US media discourse to assign moral responsibility to liberals, but not conservatives, so that liberals are supposed to empathize with MAGA voters and endeavor to understand their values but it's just normal and accepted that Republicans think liberal cities are hellholes that deserve to burn. This asymmetry isn't healthy, even if I'd rather it be resolved by a general increase in empathy than a decrease.
How about empathy for the other people they'll make miserable if you encourage their worldview , and maybe the people they'll make miserable if you further embitter them?
It's really not clear to me how MAGA people getting scammed will encourage their world view, or that there's meaningful room for further embittering them. Maybe, but perhaps they'll be discouraged! Or perhaps they'll have less money to give to actually sincere MAGA activists who will do something bad with it!
To be clear, I don't think the law should tolerate scams of this kind, or that policy should encourage them in any way. But empathy for the victims is an ask on top of policy, and "maybe there will be some bad indirect effects" is a weak argument for it.
> It's really not clear to me how MAGA people getting scammed will encourage their world view,
Young MAGA-adjacent dumbass who can't get laid sees pretty girl spouting MAGA stuff, reads all her posts and follows her or whatever, The Algorithm(TM) feeds him more MAGA stuff and MAGA posters, his whole social and information environment becomes that much more MAGA. Works even if he knows from the beginning that she's AI, but just likes the eye candy.
> or that there's meaningful room for further embittering them.
Young dumbass who can't get laid sends money, doesn't get the engagement he wants and/or realizes she's AI, can't accept feeling stupid, further projects his problems onto everything and everybody outside of himself, seeks out material that enourages him to do that...
AFAICT this uses a token-counting API so that it counts how many tokens are in the prompt, in two ways, so it's measuring the tokenizer change in isolation. Smarter models also sometimes produce shorter outputs and therefore fewer output tokens. That doesn't mean Opus 4.7 necessarily nets out cheaper, it might still be more expensive, but this comparison isn't really very useful.
For some real data, Artificial Analysis reported that 4.6 (max) and 4.7 (max) used 160M tokens and 100M tokens to complete their benchmark suite, respectively:
Looking at their cost breakdown, while input cost rose by $800, output cost dropped by $1400. Granted whether output offsets input will be very use-case dependent, and I imagine the delta is a lot closer at lower effort levels.
That’s just wrong. File reads, searches, compiler output, are the top input token consumers in my workflow. None of them can be removed. And they are the majority of my input tokens. That’s also why labs are trying to make 1M input work, and why compaction is so important to get right.
Regarding output - yes, but that wasn’t the topic in this thread. It’s just easier to argue with input tokens that price has gone up. I have a hunch the price for output will go up similarly, but can’t prove it. The jury’s out IMO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816960
This has no bearing on my comment. The point is that a better model avoids dozens of prompts and tool calls by making fewer CORRECT tool calls, with the user needing no more prompts.
I’m surprised this is even a question; obviously a better prompter has the same properties and it’s not in dispute?
Yes. I actually noticed my token usage go down on 4.6 when I started switching every session to max effort. I got work done faster with fewer steps because thinking corrected itself before it cycled.
I’ve noticed 4.7 cycling a lot more on basic tasks. Though, it also seems a bit better at holding long running context.
I'm willing to believe this but the explanation given in the article doesn't make sense to me:
> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.
What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.
Yes, but you can't replicate a bottle of unscented shampoo ad-infinitum for basically zero additional cost. With books, print-on-demand and digital particularly, you can. Then it all becomes a huge one-off cost with a huge profit potential.
I already suspected the first comment was by an LLM, but deleted that from my reply as it didn't feel like a productive accusation. However, with "that's a fair point" as an opener, plus the sheer typing speed implied by replies, and the way that individual sentences thread together even as the larger point is incoherent, I'm now confident enough to call it.
I actually use assistive voice transcription as I am unable to type well with a keyboard.
[Edit: update]
I use assistive voice transcription because I'm unable to type well with a keyboard. But I'd point out that "you must be an AI" has become the new way to dismiss an argument without engaging with it. It's the modern equivalent of "you're just copy-pasting talking points", it lets you discard everything someone said without addressing a single word of it.
The fact that my sentences "thread together" is not evidence of anything other than coherent thinking. And speed of response says more about the tools someone uses than whether a human is behind them. Plenty of people use dictation, accessibility tools, or just happen to type fast.
Ok, good to have that explanation. Your larger point, though, remains incoherent. Whether Anthropic saw this coming has nothing to do with the substance of the conflict here and is very much not "the real question".
Thanks. I saw everybody responding as if there might be at least a modicum of gravitas there, and thought I was suffering a stroke, or was pulled into another dimension.
Because mass surveillance has been happening by every tech company under every president since George W. Bush, and despite everybody trying to stop it they haven’t been able to.
OpenAI has already said that they’ll give up whatever info the government wants if they’re issued a subpoena; they don’t have a choice.
Companies have to comply with subpoenas (unless they can beat them in court, and with an alternative of going to jail). Subpoenas are supposed to be targeted at individuals and need some kind of process, usually judicial, each time one is issued. Mass surveillance - the Anthropic blog post raises the possibility of using AI to classify the political loyalties of every citizen - is a different thing.
A subpoena isn't "simply asking." Subpoena literally means "under penalty" in Latin. If the company does not comply they will be held in contempt of court and someone may well go to jail.
It's not recent news that Anthropic has (had?) DoD contracts. This is a lot of words to write while seeming ignorant of basic facts about the situation.
The argument isn't that nobody knew Anthropic had DoW contracts. The argument is that there's a difference between "publicly known if you follow defense-tech procurement" and "trending on social media where Anthropic's core audience is now actively discussing it." Both can be true simultaneously.
A fact being technically available and that fact commanding widespread public attention are very different things. Anthropic's communications team understands this distinction even if you don't find it interesting. The blog post wasn't written for people who already track federal AI contracts, it was written for the much larger audience encountering this story for the first time and forming opinions about it in real time.
If the point you're making is just "I already knew this," that's fine, but it doesn't address anything about the incentive structure behind the public response.
That's a nice straw man you got there. I don't mind you characterizing the negotiation however you want. That's not the debate. Call it "shakedown" or "mafia" as someone else mentioned, or whatnot (although it is appears the company that was trying to grandstand the elected US Government by dictating their own terms was Anthropic, not the other way around, but I digress). The question is was it a breach of contract or just a tough negotiation?
Companies have gone out of business due to a big customer pulling the contract. Imagination Technologies comes to mind. This is not a rare thing in business.
I have to admit, “accept this unilateral change to the contract or we will use the full power of the US government to destroy your company” is certainly a tough negotiation stance. You got that part right.
How did you get the "destroy your company" part? If HN sentiment is any evidence, they are even more popular than before. GPU is a constrained resource and I am sure they are going to have enough business to saturate what they got. I'm certain they would have just removed (and still will remove) two paragraphs from the terms had it really "destroyed their company."
> full power of the US government
Haha, I can assure you that is not even close to the full power of US government. Ask the crypto people during Biden admin for just a little more power (still not even close to "full.")
"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
For a company of Anthropic's size, this may very well be a death sentence, even if their work has nothing to do with the military supply chain. They could have just canceled the contract, but they wanted to go full Darth Vader on them to prove a point in case anyone else thought about "negotiating" "voluntarily" with the federal government.
You don't think Anthropic is going out of business any minute now, do you? This is just rhetoric. Affirmative evidence is they would just remove two paragraphs if they were.
I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-education"), to which you think the previous commenter likely subscribes, and which voters associated with Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right, and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you mean, rather than just relying on allusion.
(I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much the way he said he would.)
> Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error...
This is just totally disconnected from policy reality. Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_ he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the subservience of the political class" to transgender people.
On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein connections and entirely unabashed about making money for his businesses and family using his government position. If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning could the words possibly have?
"Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions of reality, just because "at least that is the perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it will end with either re-connecting these people to reality or disenfranchising them (really, them disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us, e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an election). The former seems vastly preferable.
Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very little sympathy for a demand that people on the left speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican politicians talk about cities is another thing that's totally unsustainable.
This is a great example of a well put together, level-headed analysis, that I still think misses some key facts about how right wing propaganda works.
> Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of the democratic party from their ideological roots in the labor movement which was always militantly against illegal immigration
Both Biden and Obama turned away more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. And Clinton is the kind of denying asylum. The idea that we just had completely open borders and nothing was being done about is a fabrication.
> Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the general zeitgeist at large relative to their population size
If you actually pay attention to who is talking about Trans people, it is the right. Liberal media may be occasionally baited into arguing about it, but to say it was a major platform is a perception the right crafted. Fox was talking about it 24/7 leading up to the election [1]. Musk and Trump were tweeting about it constantly. They ran political ads saying they wanted to convert your kids to trans ideology. It's gotten so bad that our current president just harasses women that look kinda manly, saying they are trans.
If the Democrat leadership weren't going all-in on this ideology despite the demonstrable harms it's causing, the Republicans would have almost nothing to say about it.
As an example, replacing sex with "gender identity" in prisons policy has inflicted considerable harm on women prisoners, who have been sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by male prisoners who were transferred to the female prison estate on the basis of their supposed "female gender identity".
Feminist groups like WoLF spoke up on the horrors of this first, and the Republicans followed when they realized they could capitalize on this politically. But really it shouldn't have happened at all.
A considerable portion of the AI-girl rhetoric quoted in the article is specifically denigrating liberals. It would be very generous and possibly laudable of liberals to nevertheless feel empathy for the people falling for it, but I think it's pretty understandable if most don't. And I'm not even convinced it's laudable; there's a particular tendency in US media discourse to assign moral responsibility to liberals, but not conservatives, so that liberals are supposed to empathize with MAGA voters and endeavor to understand their values but it's just normal and accepted that Republicans think liberal cities are hellholes that deserve to burn. This asymmetry isn't healthy, even if I'd rather it be resolved by a general increase in empathy than a decrease.
reply