Right. A platform who makes money the more you have to use it is definitely optimizing to get you the right answer in as few tokens as possible.
There is absolutely no incentive to do that, for any of these companies. The incentive is to make the model just bad enough you keep coming back, but not so bad you go to a competitor.
We've already seen this play out. We know Google made their search results worse to drive up and revenue. Exact same incentives are at play here, only worse.
IF I USE LESS TOKENS, ANTHROPIC GETS MORE MONEY! You are blindly pattern matching to "corporation bad!" without actually considering the underlying structure of the situation. I believe there's a phrase for this to do with probabilistic avians?
As an investor in Anthropic which pricing strategy would you support? That's the question you need to ask, not what there current pricing strategy in the win the market phase happens to be.
It’s sort of surprising how naive developers still are given the countless rug pulls over the past decade or two.
You’re right on the money: the important thing to look at are the incentive structures.
Basically all tech companies from the post-great financial crisis expansion (Google, post Balmer Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etc) started off user-friendly but all eventually converged towards their investment incentive structure.
One big exception is Wikipedia. Not surprising since it has a completely different funding model!
I’m sure Anthropic is super user friendly now, while they are focused on expansion and founding devs still have concentrated policial sway. It will eventually converge on its incentive structures to extract profit for shareholders like all other companies.
The Max plan has usage limits, and you can buy more... Which is exactly what I'm talking about...
And the incentive is even strong for the lower tiers. They want answers to be just good enough to keep you using it, but bad enough that you're pushed towards buying the higher tier.
Have you actually used a max plan? You have to try really damn hard to get close to the max plan usage. I don't think that's something that realistically happens by accident, you have to be deliberately spawning a huge number of subagents or something.
There is absolutely no incentive to do that, for any of these companies. The incentive is to make the model just bad enough you keep coming back, but not so bad you go to a competitor.
We've already seen this play out. We know Google made their search results worse to drive up and revenue. Exact same incentives are at play here, only worse.