[thomassmith65]

And still are gaslighting:

  We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium

Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.

[sobjornstad]

Is adding JPEG compression to your software “intentional degradation” of the software? I wouldn't say providing a selectable option to use a faster, cheaper version of something qualifies as “degradation”.

It is certainly true that they did a poor job communicating this change to users (I did not know that the default was “high” before they introduced it, I assumed they had added an effort level both above and below whatever the only effort choice was there before). On the other hand, I was using Claude Code a fair bit on “medium” during that time period and it seemed to be performing just fine for me (and saving usage/time over “high”), so it doesn't seem clear that that was the wrong default, if only it had been explained better.

[BoorishBears]

Is default enabling JPEG compression to your software's output because the compression saves you money “intentional degradation” of the software?

I would say it does, and I'd loathe to use anything made by people who'd couch that change to defaults as "providing a selectable option to use a faster, cheaper version".

Yuck.

[endymion-light]

yes. if instagram started performing intensive JPEG compression that made photos choppy and unpleasant, I would consider that an intentional degredation of the software.

[xpe]

As I understand Anthropic's recent retrospective, calling the models directly via API did not change; the problem was that the harness changed and this was not communicated well to users.

Metaphorical reasoning is lossy, so talking about lossy image compression seems to be ironically fitting! ... perhaps a (hypothetical) metaphor involves Photoshop changing their default JPEG compression level without making it clear to users. PS did not change the JPEG algorithm, only a setting for it. If you look closely, you would notice it: I'll come back to this point in the last paragraph.

But a part of metaphor breaks down if you accept that Anthropic was making a net positive trade-off for customers so that they could provide a better overall service level statistically to their entire user base.

A rough metaphor for the individual versus collective trade-off might be when a retail store caps the number of toilet paper rolls customer can buy at a time. The goal is to reduce hoarding, which in a way is an analogous to Claude users having usage patterns at the high end of the statistical tail.

When it comes to PR*, transparency almost always wins? Anthropic's mistake hid the change from users, but they're going to notice when overall performance is degraded. I would hazard a guess that Claude has endured more verbal assault in the last month than in its entire history.

* both for public relations and pull requests

[xpe]

To my eye, gaslighting is a serious accusation. Wikipedia's first line matches how I think of it: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality."

Did I miss something? I'm only looking at primary sources to start. Not Reddit. Not The Register. Official company communications.

Did Anthropic tell users i.e. "you are wrong, your experience is not worse."? If so, that would reach the bar of gaslighting, as I understand it (and I'm not alone). If you have a different understanding, please share what it is so I understand what you mean.

[thomassmith65]

I'd rather not speak too poorly of Anthropic, because - to the extent I can bring myself to like a tech company - I like Anthropic.

That said, the copy uses "we never intentionally degrade our models" to mean something like "we never degrade one facet of our models unless it improves some other facet of our models". This is a cop out, because it is what users suspected and complained about. What users want - regardless of whether it is realistic to expect - is for Anthropic to buy even more compute than Anthropic already does, so that the models remain equally smart even if the service demand increases.

[xpe]

It seems to me you dropped the "gaslighting" claim without owning it. I personally find this frustrating. I prefer when people own up to their mistakes. Like many people, to me, "gaslighting" is just not a term you throw around lightly. Then you shifted to "cop out". (This feels like the motte and bailey.) But I don't think "cop out" is a phrase that works either...

Some terms:... The model is the thing that runs inference. Claude Code is not a model, it is harness. To summarize Anthropic's recent retrospective, their technical mistakes were about the harness.

I'm not here to 'defend' Anthropic's mistakes. They messed up technically. And their communication could have been better. But they didn't gaslight. And on balance, I don't see net evidence that they've "copped out" (by which I mean mischaracterized what happened). I see more evidence of the opposite. I could be wrong about any of this, but I'm here to talk about it in the clearest, best way I can. If anyone wants to point to primary sources, I'll read them.

I want more people to actually spend a few minutes and actually give the explanation offered by Anthropic a try. What if isolating the problems was hard to figure out? We all know hindsight is 20/20 and yet people still armchair quarterback.

At the risk of sounding preachy, I'm here to say "people, we need to do better". Hacker News is a special place, but we lose it a little bit every time we don't in a quality effort.

[thomassmith65]

Fair enough. If the comments in question were still editable, I would be happy to replace 'gaslighting' with 'being a bit slippery' or something less controversial.

No worries about 'sounding preachy'; it's a good thing people want to uphold the sobriety that makes HN special.

[asdewqqwer]

I think there are plenty of such reply on github. For example the one to AMD AI director's issue.

[xpe]

Please link us to it. Linking it provides an anchor for community discussion.

[oofbey]

They didn’t say “your experience is not worse” but they did frequently say “just turn reasoning effort back up and it will be fine”. And that pretty explicitly invalidates all the (correct) feedback which said it’s not just reasoning effort.

They knew they had deliberately made their system worse, despite their lame promise published today that they would never do such a thing. And so they incorrectly assumed that their ham fisted policy blunder was the only problem.

Still plenty I prefer about Claude over GPT but this really stings.

[xpe]

I'm aiming for intellectual honesty here. I'm not taking a side for a person or an org, but I'm taking a stand for a quality bar.

> They knew they had deliberately made their system worse

Define "they". The teams that made particular changes? In real-world organizations, not all relevant information flows to all the right places at the right time. Mistakes happen because these are complex systems.

Define "worse". There are lot of factors involved. With a given amount of capacity at a given time, some aspect of "quality" has to give. So "quality" is a judgment call. It is easy to use a non-charitable definition to "gotcha" someone. (Some concepts are inherently indefensible. Sometimes you just can't win. "Quality" is one of those things. As soon as I define quality one way, you can attack me by defining it another way. A particular version of this principle is explained in The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian, by the way, regarding predictive policing iirc.)

I'm seeing a lot of moral outrage but not enough intellectual curiosity. It embarrassingly easy to say "they should have done better" ... ok. Until someone demonstrates to me they understand the complexity of a nearly-billion dollar company rapidly scaling with new technology, growing faster than most people comprehend, I think ... they are just complaining and cooking up reasons so they are right in feeling that way. This possible truth: complex systems are hard to do well apparently doesn't scratch that itch for many people. So they reach for blame. This is not the way to learn. Blaming tends to cut off curiosity.

I suggest this instead: redirect if you can to "what makes these things so complicated?" and go learn about that. You'll be happier, smarter, and ... most importantly ... be building a habit that will serve you well in life. Take it from an old guy who is late to the game on this. I've bailed on companies because "I thought I knew better". :/

[philipwhiuk]

> Define "they". The teams that made particular changes? In real-world organizations, not all relevant information flows to all the right places at the right time. Mistakes happen because these are complex systems.

Accidentally/deliberately making your CS teams ill-informed should not function as a get out of jail free card. Rather the reverse.

[xpe]

> Accidentally/deliberately making your CS teams ill-informed should not function as a get out of jail free card. Rather the reverse.

Thanks for your reply. I very much agree that intention or competence does not change responsibility and accountability. Both principles still apply.

In this comment, I'm mostly in philosopher and rationalist mode here. Except for the [0] footnote, I try to shy away from my personal take about Anthropic and the bigger stakes. See [0] for my take in brief. (And yes I know brief is ironic or awkward given the footnote is longer than most HN comments.) Here's my overall observation about the arc of the conversation: we're still dancing around the deeper issues. There is more work to do.

It helps to recognize the work metaphors are doing here. You chose the phrase "get out of jail free". Intentionally or not, this phrase smuggles in some notion of illegality or at least "deserving of punishment" [1]. The Anthropic mistakes have real-world impacts, including upset customers, but (as I see it) we're not in the realm of legal action nor in the realm of "just punishment", by which I mean the idea of retributive justice [2].

So, with this in mind, from a customer-decision point of view, the following are foundational:

    Rat-1: Pay attention to _effects_ of what Anthropic. did

    Rat-2: Pay attention to how these effects _affect me_.

But when to this foundation, I need to be careful:

    Rat-3: Not one-sidedly or selectively re-introduce *intent* into my other critiques. If I get back to diagnosing or inferring *intent*, I have to do so while actually seeking the whole truth, not just selecting explanations that serve my interests

    Rat-4: When in a customer frame, I don't benefit from "moralizing" ... my customer POV is not well suited for that. As a customer, my job is to *make a sensible decision*. Should I keep using Claude? If so, how do I adjust my expectations and workflow?

...

Personally, when I view the dozens of dozens I've read here, a common theme is see is disappointment. I relatively rarely see constructive and truth-seeking retrospective-work. On the other hand, I see Anthropic going out of their way to communicate their retrospective while admitting they need to do better. This is why I say this:

    Of course companies are going to screw up. The question is: as a customer, am I going to take a time-averaged view so I don't shoot myself in the foot by overreacting?

[0]: My personal big-picture take is that if anyone in the world, anywhere, builds a superintelligent AI using our current levels of understanding, there is no expectation at all that we can control it safely. So I predict with something close to 90% or higher, that civilization and humanity as we know it won't last another 10 years after the onset of superintelligence (ASI).

This is the IABIED (The book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" by Yudkowsky and Soares) argument -- plenty of people write about it -- though imo few of the book reviews I've seen substantively engage with the core arguments. Instead, most reviewers reject it for the usual reasons: it is a weird and uncomfortable argument and the people making it seem wacky or self-interested to some people. I do respect reviews who disagree based on model-driven thinking. Everything else to me reads like emotional coping rather than substantive engagement.

With this in mind, I care a lot about Anthropic's failures and what they imply about how it participates in the evolving situation.

But I care almost zero about conventional notions of blame. Taking materialism as true, free will is at bottom a helpful fiction for people. For most people, it is the reality we take for granted. The problem is blame is often just an excuse for scapegoating people for their mistakes, when in fact these mistakes just flow downstream from the laws of physics. Many of these mistakes are nearly statistical certainties when viewed from the lens of system dynamics or sociology or psychology or neuroscience or having bad role models or being born into a not-great situation.

To put it charitably, blame is what people do when they want to explain s--tty consequences on the actions of people and systems. That sense bothers me less; I'm trying to shift thinking away from the kind of blaming that leads to bad predictions.

[1]: From the Urban Dictionary (I'm not citing this as "proof of credibility" of the definition):

    "A get out of jail free card is a metaphorical way to refer to anything that will get someone out of an undesirable situation or allow them to avoid punishment."

... I'm only citing UD so you know what mean. When I use the word dictionary, I mean a catalog of usage not a prescription of correctness.

[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-retributive/