That anyone would even attempt such an experiment shows a profound misunderstanding of what this tech is. It’s depressing how stupid people are.
It was Anthropic who ran this experiment
It doesn’t detract from the parent’s comment at all.
Current AI systems can perform sophisticated analysis, engage in complex reasoning, and execute multi-step plans.
No, not really
Depends on what you’re calling AI. LLMs (and generative AI in general) are garbage for all those things, and most things in general (all things if you take their cost into account). Machine Learning and expert systems can do at least some of that.
I absolutely hate that generative AI is being marketed as though it’s deep learning instead of a fancy Markov chain. But I think I’ve lost the battle over that nomenclature.
Claude’s month as a shopkeeper offers a preview of our AI-augmented future that’s simultaneously promising and deeply weird.
Did the author have a stroke by the time they reached the end of writing the article? The mental gymnastics would be funny if it wasn’t terrifying.
Wouldn‘t be surprised if the author used AI too but then again bad or let‘s call it „weird“ journalism isn’t all that new.
It can say it can, when asked by an investor. And really, what else matters?
I mean really, where do these legends come from? I have tried to make chatgpt sort through single document and present clear organized data, present in the document, into sorted table. It can’t reliably do that. How would it do any kind of complex task? That is just laughable.
I’m convinced that people who are fascinated by llm chatbots are those who usually aren’t better than a chatbot at whatever they do. That is to say, they can’t do shit.
“I don’t know how to run a shop, but it can’t be that hard, let’s just have AI do it!”
Claude eventually resolved its existential crisis by convincing itself the whole episode had been an elaborate April Fool’s joke, which it wasn’t. The AI essentially gaslit itself back to functionality, which is either impressive or deeply concerning, depending on your perspective.
Now THAT’S some I, Robot shit. And I’m not talking about the Will Smith movie, I’m talking about the original book.
Can you talk about the movie too? I may be in the minority here but I enjoyed it.
The movie had themes about AI revolution, while the book was around robopsychology. Since this anecdote was about an AI gaslighting itself, it’s far more appropriate than the movie thematically.
This is by far the most interesting part. I want to know more about this, like why the author is so certain this wasn’t a joke.
For what its worth, Anthropic posted this in their corporate blog. So if its a joke, its coming out of vetted corporate PR.
the only real use case I’ve found for ai (not including science and stuff, I’m talking more LLM for consumer use) is when I have a very niche issue,and even then rarely does it solve the issue, just gives me a better idea of what I can go looking for
Boilerplate code is where it rocks. The syntax for that API function you use once every 5 years and no way remember, it’s got you covered. It can knock out helper functions like a boss too. Nothing complex, that takes too long to fix, but the text filter and type conversion stuff is quicker than typing them out yourself.
It’s really good for prototypes, unit tests, cicd pipelines and most orms
Thank you! This is exactly what I use it for. Things that would take 1/2 - 1 days because I need to spend much of that time remembering the syntax or which libraries to import. But AI can get 90% of the way there in 5 minutes and 97% of the way with like two more iterations on the prompt.
anything a chatbot can do, a person can do better. like you could just ask another person and you would get something more useful off the top of their head
There’s a difference between ‘a person’ and ‘every person’. A person can definitely do things better than any chat bot. But not every person can. And depending on the situation, a person who can may not be available.
Even then, there is a place where the AI beats all persons and is better in one way: speed. If the task at hand does not require a better result than what the AI outputs, then the time savings is big, because there are no situations in which any human will work faster.
Chatgpt has been useful for me to look up for related DJs, like I saw this DJ Ziggy and it show me a couple of other DJs of the Netherlands Bubbling scene.
Yeah it makes sense that they’re good at finding similar things.
It’s good at giving a new perspective or helping mental blocks.
For a first pass, yes. I wouldn’t really trust it for an unbiased, objective perspective. Each model is only as good as its training data.
It’s a good starting point, never the final product.
AI bros are trying really hard to convince people that their parrots can be useful in business settings.
This is how I know AI doesn’t really work. Give it a real use case in the physical world, it can’t be almost there, either it passes or fails.
People should really appreciate deterministic algorithm cause they could automate things in the real world
The physical world is too fast, relies on the speed of human brains calculating a million variables instantly, not mere pattern matching. See how hard it is to teach a robot to catch a ball. You have to input all the physics where a human doesn’t even consciously think on the problem.
We humans are best-in-class at pattern matching, but we often get it wrong and AI amplifies those mistakes.
AI can be great at certain tasks, but we have to be cognizant of how that works.
Claude ran a vending machine business for a month, selling tungsten cubes
hmmm
It was selling tungsten cubes to another AI who’s job was to restock the vending machine.
This is how you juice GDP.
I need a gif of a tungsten cube dropping from the top shelf of a vending machine and folding it in on itself
as long as it’s not paper clips, we’re good
Clippy? I need help
best I can do is grey goo.
If the AI cannot run the business then we must conclude that the business does not produce anything of real value.
Nothing to do but downsize and move on.
How will they protect the robots?
By pushing them down the stairs
With tungsten cubes apparently. Lots and lots of tungsten cubes!
