This is in style now. My tween daughter and her peers all own shoes that look geriatric to my eyes. I see teenagers walking around in New Balance shoes that look like my dad would have owned them 20 years ago.
Can’t speak for worldwide, but in the US Nike decided to aim for exclusivity and basically pulled their shoes from a ton of retailers. It went… not how they hoped.
I’m surprised we aren’t seeing it more already. LLMs suddenly make it reasonable to maintain multiple native apps. I’d love to see this start to supplant Electron and its ilk on the desktop.
I see this sentiment pretty regularly, and I don’t get it. Variable rewards is not sufficient to establish that it is “ basically gambling”.
Everything in life is variable reward. You invite a friend over, they might accept or they might not. Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad. You ask a colleague to finish a task, they might do it or might not or might do a good job or might not.
Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?
> "Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?"
well, no. If you work overtime and get paid overtime, you are not gambling and that is not a variable reward.
Humans engage more with rewards that are intermittent and variable. Like Futurama's scene from 'The Scary Door' where the character says "A casino where I'm winning, I must be in heaven! A casino where I always win, that's boring, I must really be IN HELL!". A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging. So if you know you get no overtime, but sometimes your boss rewards you with $5 coffee voucher, sometimes a free pizza dinner, sometimes double-time pay for the time worked or a half-day off, now you might be gambling 1hr overtime for an intermittent variable reward.
> "Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad."
Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!) and you have to drive to work regardless so you are not risking anything [you might be risking your life, but you are not making a choice which can reward you with good traffic]. You might say that going a different route is a choice and a gamble which could reward you with good traffic, but traffic engineering does not work that way because if there was a consistently low-traffic route, everyone else would take that route until it was no faster than any other route. Traffic will generally be the predictable and similar every day, plus 'arriving at work early' is not much of a reward.
> A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging.
Perhaps but predictable outcome is a very desirable quality. No one wants a hammer that sometimes drives nails and sometimes doesn’t. All of the current harness engineering work is about squeezing predictability out of the LLM.
> Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!)
Like hell it’s not. I drove into work last Friday and there was no traffic because of the holiday weekend. It was amazing. Had me considering whether Friday should be one of my standard RTO days.
I think you're missing the point. Predictable outcomes are desirable, but they aren't addictive or gambling. People quickly get used to opening the faucet and seeing water come out and stop doing it, whereas people scroll TikTok or channel surf for hours at a time.
In what way was amazing no-traffic "a reward"? What system was rewarding you for what change in behaviour?
You went off on a tangent and I responded. None of this is actually relevant to the topic of whether LLMs are “basically gambling”.
> In what way was amazing no-traffic "a reward"? What system was rewarding you for what change in behaviour?
What does this mean? Are you asking me to describe the dopamine system or are you implying that rewards have to be driven by some external system’s goal?
A reward implies it was given by something outside of your control. The lack of traffic wasn't a reward given to you, it's just a state of the highway.
You invite a friend over, but raccoon appears. Then pigeon appears. Then friend appears but at the last second suddenly becomes a banana. You remember you are out of bananas so you order more and also some cola zero cans on your local grocery delivery app. You are back to the party, but now you have 5 friends in the room, and you run de-duplication query. Now half of your friend is sitting at the sofa, and another half becomes a quarter of banana. Suddenly bananas arrive so you need to open the door. Once you are back there are no friends, pigeons or raccoons but also no bananas and no cola - all the delivery results are gone. This seems to be urgent and important, gotta fix this first before going back to that friend invitation...
This is not my experience with current AI models at all. But regardless you are not describing anything that sounds like gambling. You are describing a weird hallucinogenic experience.
i’m not sure “variable rewards” is the right term, but i do agree with the op that it is very similar to gambling.
regarding your examples, i think the difference is that with ai, you’re literally sitting in front of a machine, pressing a button, and (almost instantly) getting a result that, if not desired, can immediately be tried for again. you even spend “tokens” to do this, and at least in my native language, “token” brings to mind the coins you’d stick in a slot machine
I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial.
If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money.
If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing, the LLM produces something that is hopefully close to what you wanted. You give it more direction to prod it closer to the end state you want. You are not executing the same action, but incrementally nudging it in the right direction. I’ve literally never restarted from the same initial state with the same prompt and hoped for a different result and I don’t know why anyone would. Rarely I’ve thrown away the progress made and started over but always with a very different prompt that includes learnings from the failed attempt.
So maybe it's more like poker than a slot machine? Still intermittent rewards with a lot of random chance. The nuance of the analogy isn't that important to the general idea
The LLM could one shot a brilliant solution, or it could lead you down a days long path to nowhere. It could give you accurate useful information or it could completely make up something that isn't at all correct. The fact that each usage is a dice roll where you have a desired outcome that will be fulfilled at a variable level makes it very similar to gambling. And in fact the part that makes it addictive is the near hits where the LLM comes very close to giving you what you want, but not quite there. That keeps you coming back.
i agree with you that it’s principally different from a slot machine, and that it’s possible to use it in a way (like you describe) that is much more focused, for lack of a better term, to great effect
most people don’t use ai this way though, and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it (and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output)
perhaps it’s better to compare it to gacha than slots?
How do they use it? Surely no one is just repeating the same prompt over and over (except as a Ralph loop perhaps, which is automated). I’m really struggling with the notion that most people just throw the same prompt repeatedly hoping it eventually works. Because that doesn’t sound like gambling. It sounds crazy (and frustrating).
> and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it
In the sense that you get a dopamine reward when you succeed, sure, but I get the same reward when I code by hand and achieve a successful result.
> and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output
This is fair, because sometimes with image generation the same exact prompt will produce very different output. This is becoming less true as the models get better and it becomes more effective to direct image generation iteratively than to keep starting from scratch with a barely tweaked prompt.
When working on a problem models will walk you down a garden path requiring only yes/no answers or very brief clarifications for a long time. It's always proposing its own workarounds/suggestions/etc. Especially if trying to debug something where it has more understanding than the user so really all it needs from you is "uh sure try that too I guess" from time to time.
And sometimes the debugging has already veered completely off course at the beginning so it's futile, but each time the fleeting hope that just a few thousand more tokens will magically fix it tempts you to keep going a little longer.
as an example, i was using chatgpt a few weeks back to help me remember the name of a painting i’d seen about a decade ago. i could recall the general shape of the subject and that it was europeanish, but nothing else. after seven turns or so it finally got it, and honestly, the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot
i’ve had a similar feeling of success after trying to get it to give a comprehensible answer when asking it for a solid counter-argument to philosophical questions. it is indeed often crazy and frustrating
> but I get the same reward when I code by hand
i have only done very simple coding work with llms, so that may be why our ideas differ about the feeling of reward. this is where the comparison to gacha makes more sense than slots, since when you’re coding, you still get a reward each turn whilst chasing the final/desired result
I have this thing with a wallpaper with a small island, a (tiny?) house, a pier and a boat. Probably somewhere in Canada or Scandinavia. Had it on my PC in the 90s and no model was able to help me with this.
> the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot
I understand the joy of success but I fail to see how this is gambling. I could have an equivalent conversation with a friend (more likely about a movie in trying to remember than a painting, but still) and get the exact same type of iterative “no, not that one, it was more like X” and feel elated when my friend finally realizes I’m taking about a scene from Hot Tub Time Machine.
sorry, maybe my english is failing me here. what i was getting at is that using ai feels like gambling to me, where tokens, time, etc. are wagered against the chance for desired output. the risk is that you waste your tokens/time, and the prize is a useful answer (if not the exact code/solution/whatever one was hoping for)
i wasn’t trying to convince you, i’m just explaining that this is gambling in a meaningful sense to some people, especially with how turn-based and unpredictable the whole system is. whether it is actually gambling (semantically, legally, ontologically?) isn’t really interesting imo. what’s interesting is that it’s structured similarly and feels nearly identical to some people
but then, i also feel like there’s an element of gambling in the example of you talking with your friend, though i think it would be better illustrated if it was a conversation with a random person
I just wanted to chime in that there is nothing wrong with your English. I'm a native English speaker and I, too, find using an LLM to accomplish something to be very gambling-like. You're wagering something of value (your allotted tokens, and your time) on an unpredictable outcome that you hope benefits you.
thanks, i really appreciate the kind words. it’s just such a precise language that i worry i might be accidentally adding (or not including) important subtext in discussions like this
I agree with the other commenter. Your English is perfectly good. Your subjective experience is your own and I can’t disagree with that.
I’m working from a place where my employer pays for my tokens so I’m also not spending anything except my time. Maybe if I were, it would feel more like gambling.
I would agree that 1-2 years ago models were more "slot machine"-esque - sometimes the output was good, sometimes the output was bad. And as a result, I primarily used them for auto-complete functionality and bouncing ideas around. In those workflows, you can easily ignore it if the spin is wrong.
Not everyone has the desire to work around the system, and many are diametrically opposed to the concept of AI. They get this perception that it's a slot machine because of that inconsistency, and then do the human thing of assuming that other people must just be flawed if they're different from them. They're "addicted to gambling".
Obviously, things have changed. Open models can still be like that, but are often so fast and cheap at iterating it doesn't matter. SOTA models aren't perfect, but are to the point that they're generally much better than the average developer.
But once that perception set in and the meme spreads, it's really hard for some to break out of it. Especially at the pace AI development has been moving. It's just that simple.
> But it also can't show how conscious awareness may affect quantum wave function collapse probabilities, allowing free will to migrate to the deterministic timeline in the multiverse that most supports its well-being.
That’s true. Science can’t show a lot of things that aren’t real.
> It seems plausible there may be some adaptation to the electrical properties of being at the surface
This is like saying it’s plausible that wearing a bracelet with a small magnet in it will have health benefits. It’s pure woo. There’s no reason to believe this from a scientific angle. It’s perhaps not impossible but it is certainly not plausible.
> there was a time when fiber in food was reasonably seen as just inefficient waste
No, it fits an existing pattern. Something commonplace in our natural environment that we adapted to over millions of years and exerted a non-obvious influence that wasn't scientifically verified until recently. Dietary fiber is but one example.
I'm not saying that's "evidence", or that the posted study is valid, but I'm also not aware of any robust studies demonstrating no difference from placebo. A lack of good data is neither positive nor negative.
As for dietary fiber, it wasn't broadly seen as useful for anything other than constipation until the 1970s when it was shown that increased fiber intake reduced colon cancer risk
I suppose that’s also reasonable, though this particular repo also hosts evals and other content related to the skill. So a gist seems like it would be an addition, not a replacement.
The reality seems to be that for decades Europe gave only lip service to decoupling from American tech infrastructure, but in the last couple of years America has gone from being seen as a strong ally to being a major risk.
It will take time to move. Frankly as an American I hope it takes a long time and we get our shit together and rebuild our alliance with Europe. But it’s possible that the damage is not reversible in the next couple of decades and Europe will accelerate their decoupling. It’s also possible we continue to slide into imperialist authoritarianism (and Europe definitely accelerates their decoupling).
This is what I mean: Americans don’t understand the immense dividends they have enjoyed from being the defacto symbol of “progress” in the 20th and 21st centuries so far. American solutions were chosen by European customers because they were reliable trading partners with an air of modernity. Homegrown was seen as the antithesis to leapfrogging into the future.
People celebrated when McDonald’s came to their country or town. Not anymore.
This is in style now. My tween daughter and her peers all own shoes that look geriatric to my eyes. I see teenagers walking around in New Balance shoes that look like my dad would have owned them 20 years ago.
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