My company did something similar (dashboard to track tokens). It was made available to managers about two weeks before it was available to everyone, so I got to see all my reports' usage before they knew they were being tracked.
The dashboard got announced publicly and just about everyone's usage went up by 100%-200% almost immediately and hasn't come back down, but nothing I'm tracking shows any increase in output since then. We absolutely saw productivity gains a few months ago, but it feels like now people are just burning tokens for the sake of it.
On top of that, as a reaction to the rising costs, we've now gone from unlimited token use to every engineer now having a monthly token budget of $600. I get why that was done, but we're a publicly traded US tech company worth 10s of billions of dollars. We're not hurting for money and the knock on effects are just crazy. For example, I had an engineer in sprint planning say about a large migration type ticket, "Can we hold that ticket until the end of the month? I don't want to burn through all my tokens this early in the month." I just cannot imagine that that's the culture that our executive team was trying to cultivate when they first purchased these tools.
I'm not anti-AI and actually really enjoy using AI for development, but over and over I've watched business leaders shoot themselves in the foot trying to force more AI use on their employees in pursuit of ever increasing productivity. I just keep thinking that there's no way that any productivity gains we've seen from the forced, tracked AI usage are enough to offset the productivity lost from anxiety and churn caused by the unrealistic productivity expectations, vanity metrics, and mass layoffs that have come along with increased AI adoption.
Those executives are simply implementing the directive to inject as much AI as possible into every gear of the economy. Their bonuses depend on this. The idea is that if the world economy becomes dependent on this AI monstrosity, we won't be able to get rid of it. It will be like a situation with a nasty parasite that does a lot of harm, but cannot be removed without the host dying.
That sounds just like Microsoft, Facebook or Oracle products (in some circles). What I'm trying to say it is classic strategy done many times before with various tools (and I hate the perpetrators every time).
Without going too into detail, my company is really, really big on estimates and predictable delivery timelines. An entire years worth of work is speced out, estimated, and scheduled by the end of October the previous year. It's a really terrible process, IMO, but it's the process so it is what it is.
Normally, most teams (mine included) are about 10% behind their plan by the end of Q1. This year my team is closer to 10% ahead despite the fact that we're down one engineer due to a small re-org at the end of last year. These projects were planned and estimated before AI was in heavy use and when, at best, most AI focused devs were still using it like smart auto-complete. Essentially, we estimated the projects before AI was heavily used and we're consistently beating those estimates by a good amount which is not how all previous years have gone.
The AI metrics dashboards didn't roll out until mid-March and, while I'm still seeing us beat our estimates from last year, we're not seeing any additional gains. Basically, all of Q1 we had AI and no dashboards and were beating 2025 estimates by X%. For Q2 we had dashboards and extra pressure to use AI and we're still seeing those X% gains, but no additional gains despite higher token usages.
We also have KPIs around completing a certain number of a certain type of Jira ticket that customers can file and we've seen a similar pattern of an sharp increase in tickets completed in Dec-Feb and then the new rate holds, but no additional increase after the company started pushing AI usage.
Maybe it's just because I grew up spending way too much time on the internet, but I write like that and have since well before LLMs. As much as people like to attribute that style to AI, I don't think it's the dead giveaway that people act like it is.
I find the constant critique of punchy style a bit tiring. It would be more productive for the grandparent to think about the content and state an opinion.
Also if you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, WMBR is a fun and weird listen and clearly sounds like college radio when compared to something like WERS.
I was wondering if they are going to put Ted's crayons in the box with him. At the time of this first being done it was so comically bad, and the jokes were ruthless. As much as I'm not a fan, the modern AI stuff is so much better without saying it's good. That's just how bad Turner's colorization was. The best colorization was Weta's footage from WWI where they used the actual uniforms in the images as reference rather than just someone adding color based on the feels.
When my nephews were kids I used those old colorized movies from Turner Classics as partial proof that the old joke about the world being black, white, and shades of grey when I was kid was true. They grew up in the late 80's and early 90's watching TV shows including some great old stuff that Turner later colorized. I had told him how scientists had discovered how to improve the appearance of everything by adding other colors and as a result, scientists and artists and representatives from around the world met and collaborated on methods of colorizing everything that existed. Everyone agreed that blues would be great for the sky to lighten things up after storms; animals needed fur that blended into their environment so browns and tans like the dirt outside; rocks could be any color but earth tones (like their Mom was using in painting their house) got their names after everyone had picked colors for rocks, tree bark, leaves, etc. Plants would be green for the most part but leaves that had lightened or darkened in the fall could change colors too so every continent and country was able to decide how to color flowers and plants as they wished since coloring all flowers one color would just be boring. Snow and ice were white and water was up for grabs especially if it was in a river.
The notes they could read in the movie credits about it being a colorized version simply told them that all of the colors in that movie had been added later.
I was so convincing that one of them interrupted his teacher in class to let her know she was wrong about the rainbows and where color came from. I had made it clear that everything that we saw as colored had the colors that were assigned by international agreement after people had become tired enough of the BWG palette to sit down and make it all change.
In the end, the teacher told him he was wrong and he argued about it so I got a call one day that he had been in trouble at school and that the teacher was not thrilled to hear his explanation so I needed to clear things up for him since he was not inclined to believe her at all. I'm not sure that I ever got that completely cleared up because, to me, it was just too funny that I was the most trusted source.
Just wait until we simulate old films and media and turn them into living, breathing VR games.
We'll eventually do that for all of history. At least the history we have samples of or can plausibly recreate.
I'd imagine playing one of those might be like living your life right now. Punctuated by lots of mundane, lifelike moments.
Like reading an "internet forum" full of other period appropriate "humans".
Sounds a bit dystopian where people are living in what amount to a synthetic reality. At that point reality’s importance decreases and at some point the virtual reality becomes the more normal existence and people eschew actual reality. And at some point you think why not virtualize all experience and then life itself…
I kind of wonder if there were color photos of the actors and scenes from the time of some of the black-and-white movies. You could use them as conversion-training-data with AI to auto-colorize the movies.
Rightfully so if you ask me. Out the gate think about the implications of determining, say, skin color. I’m not saying “under no circumstances should it be done” but I also think people don’t appreciate the importance of the decisions made and the politics/implicit biases under the hood. I’m not even getting in to artistic intent and impact on lighting here either.
Colorizing b&w images is still debated to this day.
Because of the film technology at the time, a lot of the skin tones on set wouldn't match what you'd expect anyway due to makeup designed for the b&w film. Lots of sickly greens, yellows, and blues in place of red tones for instance.
At that point if you've already decided you want to colorize the film, there's a real question of how do you approach it, because being true to what was on set definitely isn't the right choice. So now you're playing with skin tones regardless.
Huh. That actually brings up a kind of modern parallel I hadn't thought of. A lot of action movies are done primarily, or in part, on greenscreen. The intent of using a greenscreen has nothing to do with what was captured, and more so to do with what is trying to be depicted; what ought be seen, not what is being seen by the actors and actresses.
It would be interesting to know if, in say, 100-200 years, there is some alternative technology that could de-render todays CGI perfectly, and then replace it with some alternative, perhaps insert some form of practical effect in a convincing way? Would being able to do so be better to do just because it can be done?
Like, suppose that one of the more recent big budget movies, Transformers or whatever, could entirely have all of the CGI stripped out of them instantly, and then be replaced with some form of "less fake" effects in a different way. Would it be good to do so, if that were possible? For me personally, I'm very much in favor of rubber suits and fake blood over sticks with ping pong ball overlayed with graphics. [1] In spite of my preference though, I don't know if however many hundreds of people who had worked the digital modeling for all of those scenes would appreciate essentially deleting all of the thousands of hours they had put into the movie.
Bringing that back to B&W films, I think that if someone was really excellent at doing the set design for B&W films, it makes me wonder how they might react if someone insisted on "fixing" the film by colorizing it, and showing their set pieces in a way that they never intended for those pieces to be seen by the audience. Like, if they weren't outright upset with even the idea of doing it at all, perhaps they might insist on some sort of creative control on how each of those set pieces were colorized and portrayed in the final product. Obviously, that would then extend out to all of the other things too, like wardrobe, makeup, etc. I could see the complexity ballooning out to be as complicated and involved as making the movie was to begin with! For example, maybe the guy that scouted the original location for the film wouldn't have chose the spots he had chosen if he knew that people would be able to see it on giant TVs that they could pause every single frame of, and perform all kinds of upscaling and digital zooms in and out on.
[1] I am firmly in favor of practical effects over digital for everything, except small technical errors like a boom mic or a coffee cup in a shot, because I think that the constraints a movie set faces will demand either: incredible innovative solutions by the crew, or, those constraints force directors to scale their vision back to something more contained and manageable. It helps to show where the scope creep for a movie is, and where it's simply unnecessary. For example, Jaws has a great backstory regarding the constant issues of the mechanical shark, it really forced Spielberg to rethink how and when the shark would be shown, and when it would be better to let the viewers mind fill in the blanks.
I think these are really interesting questions and I like a lot of what you’re saying. I don’t really agree with your near prohibition on CG, but I definitely get where it comes from and think that some productions definitely abuse it
Eh regarding skin color people don’t care about realism these days. You have historical remakes with totally anachronistic ethnicities in them and “no one” cares.
I mean sure, some people do, the same as some people used to complain about overrepresentation of caucasians in some old movies set in what was then called “the orient”. I think the only ones who put up a fight are the Japanese who don’t like their productions ethnically misrepresented as much.
B&W highlights the stories better. With color you get more ambient context and sometimes that’s interesting.
I think you have a misperception of the past. The actors that played the great chinese detective Charlie Chan were Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters.
> Eh regarding skin color people don’t care about realism these days. You have historical remakes with totally anachronistic ethnicities in them and “no one” cares.
This isn't exactly the same thing. Colorizing historical footage decides what the color is. A remake is an interpretation with nowhere near the same claim of accuracy and the audience 100% knows this. The social politics of this are incredibly important.
I had a chuckle at your comment and felt it was true. But wonder if the commenter is younger. Ted Turner was much more of a household name and public figure in the 20th century. He became less involved in the cable empire by the mid 90s. Younger millennials and onwards probably heard people talk about him a lot less.
Ps. Another memorable media portrayal of Turner, he was clearly the basis for the boss character in the 1994 cartoon The Critic.
I don't think anyone else with the name Obama has been president of anything that confers a library (let alone a presidential library), your answer seems a bit needlessly derisive. I suspect you're just insecure about your personal level of useful knowledge and are trying to lord over someone with your trivia fact.
How widely known were the pieces of text? Are we talking about a section of MLK's I Have a Dream speech or hand written birthday cards from your grandma?
I'm using those as the two extremes, but if it's anything by anyone moderately well known (even a lesser known piece of writing), I'm not too surprised that it didn't need the web to figure it out. It's like if you showed me a Wes Anderson film or played me a Bob Dylan song I'd never seen/heard before, I could probably still figure out who it is without looking anything up. I don't think it's surprising that an LLM can do that much better than a human can.
Now, if you're giving it things like personal emails between you and your family and it's able to guess who you are, that's much, much scarier.
As long as there's sufficient online presence otherwise I see no reason why a successful identity wouldn't be made. Unless there's significant effort put into making those emails different from the online content, and even then there will probably still be some "tells" that an AI can pick up on.
I mean I tried sending the pieces of text to Opus that Kelsey was referring to on her blog just to independently check the identification claim. Presumably those pieces of text first appeared on the web when the blog post was published a week ago, so no model should have memorized the exact text yet. My prompt had to specify no web search, otherwise Opus would try to search the web, though it didn't seem like Opus could find that blog post even when it did try to search the web.
I mentioned it in that thread, but when the HERMES bug was first reported multiple people on Reddit claimed that it could also be triggered with openclaw specific file names. It makes me think that instead of going just saying, "this approach for defending against 3rd party oauth isn't working" and rolling things back, they just tried to fix forward and continue with the strategy
I saw this bug mentioned on Reddit a few days ago when it first got reported and someone said it was also triggered by certain file names used in OpenClaw.
I don't think it's as sinister as you're implying. I think it's part of them disallowing 3rd party clients from using Claude Code subscription and someone making a bad assumption that certain files in a repo being a good signal that someone is attempting to bypass those rules.
It's still not a good look for Anthropic, but I don't take this as a secret attempt to sabotage a competitor. I take it as them trying to enforce rules that they had very publicly announced.
I don't have the exact ruling in front of me, but IIRC the judge pretty clearly said that training a model was fair use. IIRC, he declared it "quintessentially transformative".
The case by case basis was about acquisition and possession of the copyrighted material. Anthropic pirated a large number of books and illegally stored digital copies of many that they did purchase legally. The training being protected doesn't give them the right to violate copyright in that way.
Google, for example, purchased print versions of their training material and had a small army of employees digitize them and then delete the digital copies when they were done. That hasn't been challenged AFAIK, but would likely have been found to be not a violation. That's I think what was meant by case by case basis.
It's like if someone breaks into my house and I shoot them with my gun, that's very likely self defense, but if I'm not allowed to own a gun, I may still end up in trouble with the law.
Whether or not you’re pirating and making illegal copies of something depends greatly on the terms under which you’re allowed to make those copies. You can copy GPL-licensed code all day every day so long as you abide by the license. The same is true of the BSD licenses, MIT, ISC, Apache, et cetera.
If you’re copying or making substantially derivative works of them outside the terms of the license, you’re violating the copyright.
> If you’re copying or making substantially derivative works of them outside the terms of the license, you’re violating the copyright
I don't disagree with that.
What I'm saying is that the judge ruled that training a model using copyrighted books wasn't derivative. It was transformative, so the training wasn't a copyright violation.
He then went on to say that the way Anthropic acquired and handled that material was a copyright violation because Anthropic pirated and copied a large number of books that were not under a license like the ones you mentioned. The downloaded a bunch of books you would find at most bookstores and then actually purchased copies of them much later once they were accused of violation copyrights.
I'm just trying to make that clear because I've heard a lot of people who don't understand that the violation wasn't about the act of training or material they used, it was just how they acquired the training material.
That was one case in front of one judge. It’s weak precedent if it’s precedent at all.
Also, the reasoning behind it being transformative instead of derivative is that the output isn’t supposed to be large, unchanged chunks of the input. There’s no actual guarantee your small model run under OpenClaw won’t recreate whole modules of the input.
IIRC, in SF they're slightly more expensive before tip, but having ridden in them in SF, LA, and AZ I've always felt they were cheaper. Over the long run, they will probably end up being cheaper from the wholesale perspective since eventually the parts and technology cost will come down with time and scale while human wages will continue to rise.
That said, it doesn't really matter if they're cheaper as long as they're comparable.
The cars are newer and nicer (for now), they're almost always cleaner since they can rotating one car out for cleaning doesn't mean the driver is losing earnings, they're better drivers than the average ride-share driver, you don't feel the need to tip, and I've multiple of my friends who are women call out that they feel safer in them because there's no risk of the driver being creepy (or worse).
I don't think Waymo is trying to win on price right now. I think as long as they just stay somewhat competitive on that front the other benefits will continue to draw in customers.
Alphabet/Google/Waymo is a technology business, with emphasis on business. They're not running a charity. They're in it to make money. If it's a $20 Uber ride to somewhere, they're not going to leave money on the table and charge $10 because they don't have a driver to pay. They're going to charge $22 for the premium experience because they know people will pay that.
Of course, but I never claimed that they would do that. At some point though other autonomous services will enter the market and Waymo will have to compete with them on price. Even if that doesn't happen (which seems incredibly unlikely), they're still competing against public transit and people driving themselves (or privately owned self driving cars). Not having to pay a driver means the floor where they can make a profit is lower.
If we're in a world where human driven Uber's are $30, you're right that Waymo probably won't charge $20 just to be nice, even if it only costs them $10. They might charge $20 though if their data shows that it would 10x the number of riders or if they're also competing with another autonomous taxi company.
That sounds right. Passenger pays for lower risk, etc. The market sees the company making $2 extra and a competitor will see if they can do it for just $1 extra.
The dashboard got announced publicly and just about everyone's usage went up by 100%-200% almost immediately and hasn't come back down, but nothing I'm tracking shows any increase in output since then. We absolutely saw productivity gains a few months ago, but it feels like now people are just burning tokens for the sake of it.
On top of that, as a reaction to the rising costs, we've now gone from unlimited token use to every engineer now having a monthly token budget of $600. I get why that was done, but we're a publicly traded US tech company worth 10s of billions of dollars. We're not hurting for money and the knock on effects are just crazy. For example, I had an engineer in sprint planning say about a large migration type ticket, "Can we hold that ticket until the end of the month? I don't want to burn through all my tokens this early in the month." I just cannot imagine that that's the culture that our executive team was trying to cultivate when they first purchased these tools.
I'm not anti-AI and actually really enjoy using AI for development, but over and over I've watched business leaders shoot themselves in the foot trying to force more AI use on their employees in pursuit of ever increasing productivity. I just keep thinking that there's no way that any productivity gains we've seen from the forced, tracked AI usage are enough to offset the productivity lost from anxiety and churn caused by the unrealistic productivity expectations, vanity metrics, and mass layoffs that have come along with increased AI adoption.
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