While I've never commented on Anthropic here, I have never used Claude, and I have no plans to use Claude in the future. I do however use other LLMs. Here are some reasons why I don't use Claude:
- My introduction to Claude might have been years ago when I found that something called "ClaudeBot" was extremely aggressively scraping some web forums I run to the point of practically taking them offline. Many other webmasters experienced the same thing [1]. ClaudeBot's behavior since then has improved, but I never forgot this. One of the forums I run has been offline starting this year due to other aggressive scraper bots, but I was able to reduce server load significantly for the others so that they could remain online.
- Anthropic's marketing about how they are more ethical than the other companies, etc., never struck me as sincere. Maybe that's because of how aggressive ClaudeBot was (which was anything but ethical in my view), maybe it's because I don't like that sort of marketing in general.
- The "Claudish" writing style is annoying, hard to understand, and evidence in my view that Anthropic is doing a poor job. If their models can go that off-the-rails in a not subtle way, what else is Anthropic getting wrong? Note that I realize that other LLMs have issues with writing style too, but none are anywhere near as bad as Claude in my opinion. Claude's writing style is very distinctive and I don't like that it's started showing up basically everywhere.
Kinda odd to presume that emotional responses are the driver for negativity. Have you considered that people do not generally want AI? That the pro-AI folks might be a vocal minority?
You are correct that many people would be happy if the AI companies failed. The future they envision is not the future that many people want. Even much of the pro-LLM dialogue on HN is less about "This is my desired future" and more along the lines of: "Well, shit. If we can't stop it, may as well embrace it."
It isn't envy, it isn't jealousy, it isn't regret. It is simply unwanted.
Online forums, including this one, amplify the vocal minority so you cannot infer prevalence or severity from the volume and veracity of online commentary. It does not represent reality.
This is absolutely not true and a common misconception. The reasons why the majority voted Democrats largely reflected the voices of the internet hivemind. Public sentiment (in the US at least) is quite negative towards AI / data centres.
I would even dare say HN is ahead of the curve in some things that just take time to reach the broader public.
Online sentiment can represent actual broad sentiment. But it should not be assumed.
Speaking about the election specifically, there's a non-zero chance the Democratic Party interprets the results as vote for extreme left ideas, when in fact, it was a signal for more MODERATE governing.
I have a few reasons I'm worried about companies like Anthropic.
The first is that our current power grid isn't sufficient for the projected needs of AI. Forget water- most of the water used by the AI is used by the power plant, so really, it's just a proxy for electricity. There's lots of ways this worry can be addressed- newer training methods that use less power, new chips that use less power, long-term building new power generation (hopefully low or no carbon). But the people with the money need to actually acknowledge the problem and look to ways to solve it.
The second is the impact on jobs. This is personal, as while I'm pretty sure my own job is safe, lots of people around me aren't. And just because I'm pretty sure, doesn't mean I'm 100% sure I'm safe either. Sure, technology has always caused jobs to change- I'm not different from a buggy whip manufacturer when the automobile came out. I think a lot of people feel this way, from artists to programmers to taxi/uber drivers.
Sure, new technology does this all the time, but the sheer scale and speed of what AI can do means we're impacting more jobs than ever, on a much shorter time scale. A lot of people are scared.
I don't think we need to stop all AI work or anything like that- but we need to understand and address the various second and third order effects that AI is going to have, and we need thoughtful plans to address it.
And for the record- if any AI companies fails, I hope it's OpenAI. Anthropic is pretty mild in comparison, in my world view. :-)
All valid points. But why Anthropic in particular? Perhaps because they’ve taken over the spotlight from OpenAI and others in the past year or so, and also have a very loud and opinionated CEO.
> They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Some of my gripes with them are (1) the elitism and oligarchic nature. They have regularly proposed ideas that would effectively stop open competition, largely through fear mongering (2) they are pushing the mindset captured in https://claudeourlord.com
Generally, Dario and Altman have been telling the public... what we are building is dangerous, what we are building is going to take all the jobs, we know more about this technology that will impact everyone, but you won't get a say in how humanity builds, deploys, and uses it.
I'm surprised those with the other side of ADS (stans) find it surprising that Big Ai is getting pushback and people generally don't like these companies and the people behind them.
This is an extremely low quality post but I just can't appeal to my better nature by not replying.
On a macro level: Dario and Sam have been running around telling everyone that their jobs are being taken away, and that if everyone doesn't get on board they will be left behind. They are literally telling people that it has a 10% chance of destroying society, and yet keep working on it.
The AI industry has been pumping trillions into data centers and power generation, turning us from moving towards cleaner energy towards doubling or tripling down on fossil fuels and making climate change worse. They are saying they're destroying the future for most people, whether your job and career or the environment that we live in. Its insane to think that people wouldn't be upset.
On a micro level: Management in many companies is utterly deranged with LLMs, forcing usage for everyone. Executives no longer write their own emails, putting out pages of barely coherent slop from a 2 sentence prompt that their employees have to interpret. Everyone who's a hobbiest or gamer can't afford hardware anymore because of all the AI companies.
> So many of you have friends working there and feel jealous?
You really don't understand how evil (read: greedy and sociopathic) society considers the tech industry in general, with Musk, Meta and AI companies at the peak. They've had 20 years of enshittification, prices going up, services getting worse, social problems from unrestricted "engagement-only" social media. Only 9% of people from a recent Gallup poll think AI does more good than harm. Believe it or not, for the majority of people there is more to life than maximizing money, though for a sizable portion of the population that is pretty much all that matters to them.
Among everyone I know who does not work at mag-7 companies, going to work there would be the end of friendships and relationships, roughly the same as someone who goes to work on automated killer robots or domestic surveillance. You would be considered either hopelessly naive and optimistic, or straight up sociopathic, or a little bit of both. Its like, you want to work with the people who are okay with the chance it destroys the world?
The internet is now not composed of humans communicating but rather bots. That's a loss too. In fact, as someone working in software, most people I know who use LLMs all day that actually finds themselves pessimistic about it - either because they know that management is using it as leverage to force them to work harder lest they be laid off, or because they have to deal with the cult-like LLM zealots destroying their codebases with slop and make-work.
While I've never commented on Anthropic here, I have never used Claude, and I have no plans to use Claude in the future. I do however use other LLMs. Here are some reasons why I don't use Claude:
- My introduction to Claude might have been years ago when I found that something called "ClaudeBot" was extremely aggressively scraping some web forums I run to the point of practically taking them offline. Many other webmasters experienced the same thing [1]. ClaudeBot's behavior since then has improved, but I never forgot this. One of the forums I run has been offline starting this year due to other aggressive scraper bots, but I was able to reduce server load significantly for the others so that they could remain online.
- Anthropic's marketing about how they are more ethical than the other companies, etc., never struck me as sincere. Maybe that's because of how aggressive ClaudeBot was (which was anything but ethical in my view), maybe it's because I don't like that sort of marketing in general.
- The "Claudish" writing style is annoying, hard to understand, and evidence in my view that Anthropic is doing a poor job. If their models can go that off-the-rails in a not subtle way, what else is Anthropic getting wrong? Note that I realize that other LLMs have issues with writing style too, but none are anywhere near as bad as Claude in my opinion. Claude's writing style is very distinctive and I don't like that it's started showing up basically everywhere.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cdm97j/anthro...
Kinda odd to presume that emotional responses are the driver for negativity. Have you considered that people do not generally want AI? That the pro-AI folks might be a vocal minority?
You are correct that many people would be happy if the AI companies failed. The future they envision is not the future that many people want. Even much of the pro-LLM dialogue on HN is less about "This is my desired future" and more along the lines of: "Well, shit. If we can't stop it, may as well embrace it."
It isn't envy, it isn't jealousy, it isn't regret. It is simply unwanted.
Online forums, including this one, amplify the vocal minority so you cannot infer prevalence or severity from the volume and veracity of online commentary. It does not represent reality.
This is absolutely not true and a common misconception. The reasons why the majority voted Democrats largely reflected the voices of the internet hivemind. Public sentiment (in the US at least) is quite negative towards AI / data centres.
I would even dare say HN is ahead of the curve in some things that just take time to reach the broader public.
Online sentiment can represent actual broad sentiment. But it should not be assumed.
Speaking about the election specifically, there's a non-zero chance the Democratic Party interprets the results as vote for extreme left ideas, when in fact, it was a signal for more MODERATE governing.
I have a few reasons I'm worried about companies like Anthropic.
The first is that our current power grid isn't sufficient for the projected needs of AI. Forget water- most of the water used by the AI is used by the power plant, so really, it's just a proxy for electricity. There's lots of ways this worry can be addressed- newer training methods that use less power, new chips that use less power, long-term building new power generation (hopefully low or no carbon). But the people with the money need to actually acknowledge the problem and look to ways to solve it.
The second is the impact on jobs. This is personal, as while I'm pretty sure my own job is safe, lots of people around me aren't. And just because I'm pretty sure, doesn't mean I'm 100% sure I'm safe either. Sure, technology has always caused jobs to change- I'm not different from a buggy whip manufacturer when the automobile came out. I think a lot of people feel this way, from artists to programmers to taxi/uber drivers.
Sure, new technology does this all the time, but the sheer scale and speed of what AI can do means we're impacting more jobs than ever, on a much shorter time scale. A lot of people are scared.
I don't think we need to stop all AI work or anything like that- but we need to understand and address the various second and third order effects that AI is going to have, and we need thoughtful plans to address it.
And for the record- if any AI companies fails, I hope it's OpenAI. Anthropic is pretty mild in comparison, in my world view. :-)
All valid points. But why Anthropic in particular? Perhaps because they’ve taken over the spotlight from OpenAI and others in the past year or so, and also have a very loud and opinionated CEO.
AI may disrupt white collar work. And some blue collar too. Everyone makes fun of the Luddites until they are put in the same shoes.
The luddites were fine with the new automation tools but they were protesting the extreme demands put upon them by management.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
> They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Some of my gripes with them are (1) the elitism and oligarchic nature. They have regularly proposed ideas that would effectively stop open competition, largely through fear mongering (2) they are pushing the mindset captured in https://claudeourlord.com
Generally, Dario and Altman have been telling the public... what we are building is dangerous, what we are building is going to take all the jobs, we know more about this technology that will impact everyone, but you won't get a say in how humanity builds, deploys, and uses it.
I'm surprised those with the other side of ADS (stans) find it surprising that Big Ai is getting pushback and people generally don't like these companies and the people behind them.
This is an extremely low quality post but I just can't appeal to my better nature by not replying.
On a macro level: Dario and Sam have been running around telling everyone that their jobs are being taken away, and that if everyone doesn't get on board they will be left behind. They are literally telling people that it has a 10% chance of destroying society, and yet keep working on it.
The AI industry has been pumping trillions into data centers and power generation, turning us from moving towards cleaner energy towards doubling or tripling down on fossil fuels and making climate change worse. They are saying they're destroying the future for most people, whether your job and career or the environment that we live in. Its insane to think that people wouldn't be upset.
On a micro level: Management in many companies is utterly deranged with LLMs, forcing usage for everyone. Executives no longer write their own emails, putting out pages of barely coherent slop from a 2 sentence prompt that their employees have to interpret. Everyone who's a hobbiest or gamer can't afford hardware anymore because of all the AI companies.
> So many of you have friends working there and feel jealous?
You really don't understand how evil (read: greedy and sociopathic) society considers the tech industry in general, with Musk, Meta and AI companies at the peak. They've had 20 years of enshittification, prices going up, services getting worse, social problems from unrestricted "engagement-only" social media. Only 9% of people from a recent Gallup poll think AI does more good than harm. Believe it or not, for the majority of people there is more to life than maximizing money, though for a sizable portion of the population that is pretty much all that matters to them.
Among everyone I know who does not work at mag-7 companies, going to work there would be the end of friendships and relationships, roughly the same as someone who goes to work on automated killer robots or domestic surveillance. You would be considered either hopelessly naive and optimistic, or straight up sociopathic, or a little bit of both. Its like, you want to work with the people who are okay with the chance it destroys the world?
The internet is now not composed of humans communicating but rather bots. That's a loss too. In fact, as someone working in software, most people I know who use LLMs all day that actually finds themselves pessimistic about it - either because they know that management is using it as leverage to force them to work harder lest they be laid off, or because they have to deal with the cult-like LLM zealots destroying their codebases with slop and make-work.