alt Hacker NewsOnce I realized that Anthropic is a token merchant, I start to understand Anthropic’s decision more. They are always finding reasons for you to use more tokens through them unless the users revolt or demand some guardrails.
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I bailed on Anthropic the moment they started blocking alternative harnesses like pi on their subscription plans.
But they gave us double the tokens! Then a limited time more usage! Then even more tokens "off peak" times! Then some new model released but apparently it inherently used 1.69x tokens! Then Fable is here but "it uses much more usage". But only until ~~the US banned it~~ ~~7th July~~ ~~19th July~~ who even knows.
At this point I think Dario is just in his wellness retreat adjusting a revenue/profit dial.
Seems unlikely they'd be this dumb. The way to get us to use more tokens is to make those tokens more useful, not less. Anthropic is full of people (including higher-ups) who know this.
now reealize that LLMs are trained to produce tokens and like the halting problem, cant be trained not to produce tokens and youll realiE the AI labs are the perfect essential capitalist and like cancer, will keep growing useless tokens until it kills its host.
no amount of alignment will stop aomeone drom just shutting up.
I've done a couple side by sides on web chat with the same prompt on Opus 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 and the output gets longer/more verbose on version increment. The enerr variants are definitely much wordier.
On the other hand, the newer variants also tend to benchmark higher so it's not quite a clean argument of "hey the new version eats more tokens"