Charge on the input tokens, then you will naturally optimise for fewer output tokens.
Theoretically.
In reality, one sessions output tokens become the next sessions input tokens (at least if you continue the topic) so, its not as aligned as all that.
But the parent is right, when incentives are not aligned, friction will happen. Its inevitable.
“Claude, spend the next 10 hours trying to solve the Reimann Hypothesis”.
I agree that incentives are misaligned but there’s several competing model providers. If one gets funny with their costs people will jump ship, especially if the gap between the top 2 labs and everyone else keeps shrinking.
“I can take current sources and tell you how solved this is, but I am not willing to work to a timeframe or to solve things that aren’t yet solved by mathematicians or science”
These safeguards already exist when they get a whiff that you might be using Claude to fix security issues. Doesn’t seem farfetched given the incentives I outlined that they would apply to this kind of abuse.
How loose those controls are becomes a market force.
Perfect, a coding agent that refuses to do things that haven’t already been done before.
Hahahaha, I think you’ve misunderstood what LLMs are.
Have you ever tried using one? Or just understanding them?
Yes.
But just so we're both entirely clear on what an LLM is... it's a token prediction system.
it genuinely can't do things except recall things that have already existed.
People are having great success composing things together in new ways, but just like the english language has a finite number of sentences, and music has a finite number of chords: LLMs too are just combining things that have existed.
I don't want to sound condescending, it is remarkable how useful this technology is, but please don't evangelise them on capabilities that they genuinely can never have.
Laptop computers have incredible processing capabilities but nobody expects them to be able to walk your dog, no matter how useful they actually are at doing other things.
Yes and you suggested Anthropic have their coding agent refuse to attempt to solve anything it can’t find a preexisting solution to in case it turns out to be hard, if I understand you correctly.
Knowing how hard something will be to do before attempting it is precisely the sort of impossible thing that it couldn’t do.
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