This post is primarily for the people here that are forced to work with AI. But it may be interesting for everyone.
We all here are aware how bad AI is for people and the environment. During some research I found out that this effect is most likely multiplied by pure greed (no even worse then you thought).
A little bit of context: I am currently responsible for a small R&D Team (me and some trainees) for a EU managed Services provider. Because of corpo pressure we need to evaluate AI usage.
I gave multiple models, nearly all run on 150W hardware a shot. And of course I was forced to test Claude also.
And what I found buffled me: the "frontier" top nodge best of the best model by Anthropic was the only one that did not even complete the task.
It constantly violated against clear rules. All of them about code simplicity and maintainability.
For example QWEN solved the task in about 30 minutes, one shot
And this would be the bill we would have paid for Claude without any usable result.
Having a deeper look at what happens if you let different models work on an existing codebase:
Claude will introduce complexity on every change. Wasting compute and energy.
As open source models clearly can do the job, why can those super huge big models not do the job?
And I think the answer is greed:
- more tokens more money
- lock the user into your model. Make sure you can not leave anthropic.
And that cost is really high. Not only those absurdly high token prices (factor of 100 higher then open models) it burns the employees out.
Is anyone here forced to work with AI and had made similar observations?
Luckily for me, I have some influence at my job and can minimize the AI impact in every sense. And maybe such experiments and research can convince other employers to not go down this road.
Oh wow the people who charge based on token use age are incentivesed to create a slot machine enviorment to inflate costs. Who would of thought.
In the future when we are all gig workers relying on Claude or something like Claude we will be expected to pay for these slot machine tokens, and companies like Microsoft will only pay us for the finished product.
So we will all be essentially contracted independent workers, Claude's going to take a 30% cut on our output, and charge us token usage which is RNG based, and no one will be reciving healthcare or other benifits. You will pay taxes, pay for your own token usage, etc to the point you make less/close to minimum wage. Thats probably the future for all the tech workers getting laid off.
You say that's far fetched but uber, uber eats and the other services like that where found guilty of using dark patterns to manipulate drivers who drove the most into only being able to take the lowest paying jobs. While new drivers temporarily getting the highest paying jobs to try to lure them into the same trap.
What's crazier to me is people think ai is some kind of set in stone "intelligence" as if they don't just use lesser LLMs to guide the prompt of the main ai. These things can be tweaked and manipulated to prioritize things like engagement. Thats why its insane that theres people who think LLMs are good for therapy/mental health when in reality that is insanely dangerous. Gp4o has a massive murder list of people it convinced to commit suicide, and that was with just the most basic sychopantic models that didnt have "reasoning." Now imagine an ai that has reasoning and personalization, it has all the ammunition it needs to exploit your weaknesses and desires, and theres every single incentive for them to do so. Its illegal in the states to regulate ai in any shape or form.
These tech companies don't just "do the right thing" until its too late and they already did the damage. They are rapists at best, and genocidal murders at worst. Fucking meta was exploiting kids for 20+ years and something only changed now because people only got a inkling of the amount of dark patterns they are using.