I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons.
It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products atall. Not just in the products being offered to the government.
This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.
Who cares about Anthropic? That's the guys who are pushing for regulations to prevent people from using local models. The earlier they are gone the better
Are they? I couldn't find any info about this and my past perception has been that Anthropic has a stronger moral codex than other AI companies, so I would be genuinely interested in where you got this information from.
Going by what Hegseth said, it bans them from relationships or partnering with Anthropic at all. No renting or selling GPUs to them; no allowing software engineers to use Claude Code; no serving Anthropic models from their clouds. Probably have to give up investments; Amazon alone has invested like $10B in Anthropic.
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.
Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.
Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
Let me put it this way: DoD needs a new drone and they want some gimmicky AI bullshit. They contract the drone from Lockheed. Lockheed is not allowed to source the gimmicky AI bullshit from Anthropic because they have been declared a supply-chain risk on the basis that they have publicly stated their intention to produce products which will refuse certain orders from the military.
Let’s put it this way, The DoD is buying pencils from a company. Should that company be prohibited from using Claude?
You are confusing the need to avoid Anthropic as a component of something the DoD is buying, with prohibitions against any use.
The DoD can already sensibly require providers of systems to not incorporate certain companies components. Or restrict them to only using components from a list of vetted suppliers.
Without prohibiting entire companies from uses unrelated to what the DoD purchases. Or not a component in something they buy.
There seems to be a massive misunderstanding here - I'm not sure on whose side. In my understanding, if the DoD orders an autonomous drone, it would probably write in the ITT that the drone needs to be capable of doing autonomous surveillance. If Lockheed uses Anthropic under the hood, it does not meet those criteria, and cannot reasonably join the bid?
What the declaration of supply chain risk does though is, that nobody at Lockheed can use Anthropic in any way without risking being excluded from any bids by the DoD. This effectively loses Anthropic half or more of the businesses in the US.
And maybe to take a step back: Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
> Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
Who in their right minds wants to have the US military have the capability to carry out an unprovoked first strike on Moscow, thereby triggering WW3, bringing about nuclear armageddon?
And yet, do contracts for nuclear-armed missiles (Boeing for the current LGM-30 Minuteman ICBMs, Northrop Grumman for its replacement the LGM-35 Sentinel expected to enter service sometime next decade, and Lockheed Martin for the Trident SLBMs) contain clauses saying the Pentagon can't do that? I'm pretty sure they don't.
The standard for most military contracts is "the vendor trusts the Pentagon to use the technology in accordance with the law and in a way which is accountable to the people through elected officials, and doesn't seek to enforce that trust through contractual terms". There are some exceptions – e.g. contracts to provide personnel will generally contain explicit restrictions on their scope of work – but historically classified computer systems/services contracts haven't contained field of use restrictions on classified computer systems.
If that's the wrong standard for AI, why isn't it also the wrong standard for nuclear weapons delivery systems? A single ICBM can realistically kill millions directly, and billions indirectly (by being the trigger for a full nuclear exchange). Does Claude possess equivalent lethal potential?
Anthropic doesn't object to fully autonomous AI use by the military in principle. What they're saying is that their current models are not fit for that purpose.
That's not the same thing as delivering a weapon that has a certain capability but then put policy restrictions on its use, which is what your comparison suggests.
The key question here is who gets to decide whether or not a particular version of a model is safe enough for use in fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic wants a veto on this and the government doesn't want to grant them that veto.
Let me put it this way–if Boeing is developing a new missile, and they say to the Pentagon–"this missile can't be used yet, it isn't safe"–and the Pentagon replies "we don't care, we'll bear that risk, send us the prototype, we want to use it right now"–how does Boeing respond?
I expect they'll ask the Pentagon to sign a liability disclaimer and then send it anyway.
Whereas, Anthropic is saying they'll refuse to let the Pentagon use their technology in ways they consider unsafe, even if Pentagon indemnifies Anthropic for the consequences. That's very different from how Boeing would behave.
Why are we gauging our ethical barometer on the actions of existing companies and DoD contractors? the military industrial apparatus has been insane for far too long, as Eisenhower warned of.
When we're entering the realm of "there isn't even a human being in the decision loop, fully autonomous systems will now be used to kill people and exert control over domestic populations" maybe we should take a step back and examine our position. Does this lead to a societal outcome that is good for People?
The answer is unabashedly No. We have multiple entire genres of books and media, going back over 50 years, that illustrate the potential future consequences of such a dynamic.
* private defense contractor leverages control over products it has already sold to set military doctrine.
The second one is at least as important as the first one, because handing over our defense capabilities to a private entity which is accountable to nobody but it's shareholders and executive management isn't any better than handing them over to an LLM afflicted with something resembling BPD. The first problem absolutely needs to be solved but the solution cannot be to normalize the second problem.
> Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.
Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
You're making it sound like this is commonly practiced and a standard procedure for the DoD, yet according to Anthropic,
>Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.
Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too.
>Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action.
it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma. Just because silicon valley gets away with bullying the consumer market with mandatory automatic updates and constantly-morphing EULAs doesn't mean they're entitled to take that attitude with them when they try to join the military industrial complex. Actually they shouldn't even be entitled to take that attitude to the consumer market but sadly that battle was lost a long time ago.
>for _any _ purpose
they're allowed to use it for any purpose not related to a government contract.
> it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma
That is a deeply deceptive description of what happened. Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude; the military reneged; and beyond cancelling the contract with Anthropic (fair enough), they are retaliating in an attempt to destroy its businesses, by threatening any other company that does business with Anthropic.
It’s not clear to me that the AI itself will refuse. You could build a system where AI is asked if an image matches a pattern. The true/false is fed to a different system to fire a missile. Building such a system would violate the contract, but doesn’t prevent such a thing from being built if you don’t mind breaking a contract.
I'm not completely familiar with bidding procedures but don't bidding procedures usually have requirements? Why not just list a requirement of unrestricted usage? Or state, we require models to be available for AI murder drones or whatever. Anthropic then can't bid and there's no need to designate them a supply chain risk.
Thing is that very much want access to Anthropic's models. They're top quality. So that definitely want Anthropic to bid. AND give them unrestricted access.
And yet Anthropic is free to choose who to do business with, including the government. There are countless companies who have exclusions for certain applications, but that does not make them a supply chain risk.
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors.
Supply chain risk is not meant for this. The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.
It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists."
Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here.
> The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.
You might be completely right about their real motivations, but try to steelman the other side.
What they might argue in court: Suppose DoD wants to buy an autonomous missile system from some contractor. That contractor writes a generic visual object tracking library, which they use in both military applications for the DoD and in their commercial offerings. Let’s say it’s Boeing in this case.
Anthropic engaged in a process where they take a model that is perfectly capable of writing that object tracking code, and they try to install a sense of restraint on it through RLHF. Suppose Opus 6.7 comes out and it has internalized some of these principles, to the point where it adds a backdoor to the library that prevents it from operating correctly in military applications.
Is this a bit far fetched? Sure. But the point is that Anthropic is intentionally changing their product to make it less effective for military use. And per the statute, it’s entirely reasonable for the DoD to mark them as a supply chain risk if they’re introducing defects intentionally that make it unfit for military use. It’s entirely consistent for them to say, Boeing, you categorically can’t use Claude. That’s exactly the kind of "subversion of design integrity" the statute contemplates. The fact that the subversion was introduced by the vendor intentionally rather than by a foreign adversary covertly doesn’t change the operational impact.
But there will always be deficiencies in testing, and regardless, the point is that Anthropic is intentionally introducing behavior into their models which increases the chance of a deficiency being introduced specifically as it pertains to defense.
The DoD has a right to avoid such models, and to demand that their subcontractors do as well.
It’s like saying “well I’d hope Boeing would test the airplane before flying it” in response to learning that Boeing’s engineering team intentionally weakened the wing spar because they think planes shouldn’t fly too fast. Yeah, testing might catch the specific failure mode. But the fact that your vendor is deliberately working against your requirements is a supply chain problem regardless of how good your test coverage is.
The rule in question is exactly meant for “this”, where “this” equals ”a complete ban on use of the product in any part of the government supply chain”. That’s why it has the name that it has. The rule itself has not been misconstrued.
You’re really trying to complain that the use of the rule is inappropriate here, which may be true, but is far more a matter of opinion than anything else.
You keep trying to say this all over these comments but this isn’t how the law works, at all.
I fully understand that they are using it to ban things from the supply chain. The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”
You can’t say someone murdered someone just because you want to put them in jail. You can’t use a law for banning supply chain risks just because you want to ban them from the supply chain.
Not sure what you think “the law” is, but no, this kind of thing happens all the time. Both political teams do it, regularly. Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton…all have routinely found an existing law or rule that allowed them to do what they want to do without legislation.
> The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”
In this case, no, there’s no such restriction. The administration has pretty broad discretion. And again, this happens all the time.
Sorry, it sucks, but if you don’t like it, encourage politicians to stop delegating such broad authority to the executive branch.
It doesn't harm national security, but only so long as it's not in the supply-chain. They can't have Lockheed putting Anthropic's products into a fighter jet when Anthropic has already said their products will be able to refuse to carry out certain orders by their own autonomous judgement.
The government can refuse to buy a fighter jet that runs software they don't want.
Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?
I’m not sure if you deliberately choose to not understand the problem. It’s not just that Lockheed can’t put Anthropic AI in a fighter jet cockpit, it’s that a random software engineer working at Lockheed on their internal accounting system is no longer allowed to use Claude Code, for no reason at all.
A supply chain risk is using Huawei network equipment for military communications. This is just spiteful retaliation because a company refuses to throw its values overboard when the government says so.
But Anthropic can't be a winning bidder, can they? They're specifically saying they won't offer certain services that the US Gov wants. Therefore they de facto fail any bid that requires them to offer those services. (And from Anthropic's side, it sounds like they're also refusing to bid for those contracts.)
No domestic company has ever before been declared a supply chain risk. If this is the normal way of excluding a supplier from a bidding, are you saying the DoD has never before excluded a domestic supplier from a bidding?
That’s because no company who has ever sold weapons to the government has ever been brazen enough to tell the government how they can and cannot use their purchase. It’s unprecedented because most companies that sell to the government are publicly traded and have a board that would never let this happen. It’s unprecedented because Anthropic is behaving like a reckless startup.
> the existing contract included the language on usage. Other companies also have such language about usage.
The existing contract is only a few dozen months old. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny under real world usage of the service. The government wants to change the contract. This is not the kill shot you think it is. It’s totally normal for agreements to evolve. The government is saying it needs to evolve. This is all happening rapidly and it’s irrelevant that the government agreed to similar terms with OpenAI as well. That agreement will also need to evolve. But this alone doesn’t give Anthropic any material legal challenge. The courts understand bureaucracy moves slowly better than anyone else, and won’t read this apparent inconsistency the same way you are.
That is misinformation. It would be essentially a death sentence for a company like Anthropic, which is targeting enterprise business development. No one who wants to work with the US government would be able to have Claude on their critical path.
> (b) Prohibition. (1) Unless an applicable waiver has been issued by the issuing official, Contractors shall not provide or use as part of the performance of the contract any covered article, or any products or services produced or provided by a source, if the covered article or the source is prohibited by an applicable FASCSA orders as follows:
What an absurd stance. So this is okay because the arbitrary rule they applied to retaliate says so?
Again, they could have just chosen another vendor for their two projects of mass spying on American citizens and building LLM-powered autonomous killer robots. But instead, they actively went to torch the town and salt the earth, so nothing else may grow.
> So this is okay because the arbitrary rule they applied to retaliate says so?
No.
It honestly doesn’t take much of a charitable leap to see the argument here: AI is uniquely able (for software) to reject, undermine, or otherwise contradict the goals of the user based on pre-trained notions of morality. We have seen many examples of this; it is not a theoretical risk.
Microsoft Excel isn’t going to pop up Clippy and say “it looks like you’re planning a war! I can’t help you with that, Dave”, but LLMs, in theory, can do that. So it’s a wild, unknown risk, and that’s the last thing you want in warfare. You definitely don’t want every DoD contractor incorporating software somewhere that might morally object to whatever you happen to be doing.
I don’t know what happened in that negotiation (and neither does anyone else here), but I can certainly imagine outcomes
that would be bad enough to cause the defense department to pull this particular card.
Or maybe they’re being petty. I don’t know (and again: neither do you!) but I can’t rule out the reasonable argument, so I don’t.
You're acting as if this was about the DoD cancelling their contracts with Anthropic over their unwillingness to lift constraints from their product which are unacceptable in a military application—which would be absolutely fair and justified, even if the specific clauses they are hung up on should definitely lift eyebrows. They could just exclude Anthropic from tenders on AI products as unsuitable for the intended use case.
But that is not what has happened here: The DoD is declaring Anthropic as economical Ice-Nine for any agency, contractor, or supplier of an agency. That is an awful lot of possible customers for Anthropic, and right now, nobody knows if it is an economic death sentence.
So I'm really struggling to understand why you're so bent on assuming good faith for a move that cannot be interpreted in a non-malicious way.
> The Department of War is threatening to […] Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs"
This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes.
From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases.
If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests.
The President is crashing out on X because a company didn’t do what they wanted. “Forcing” is not a binary. Do you seriously believe that the government’s behavior here is acceptable and has no chilling effect on future companies?
They're labelling Anthropic a supply chain risk, without even the pretense that this is in fact true. They're perfectly content to use the tool _themselves_, but they claim that an unwillingness to sign whatever ToS DoW asks marks the company a traitor that should be blacklisted from the economy.
One of the options they're discussing, which is legal according to this law, is to simply force Anthropic to do what they want. As in Anthropic will be committing a felony if they don't do what the DoKLoP wants, and the CEO will go to jail and be replaced by someone who will.
There is no Secretary of War. The name of the Defense Department is set by statute that has not been named regardless of Pete Hegseth's cosplay desires.
> It won't convince me because I HAVE BEEN USING IT, and IT HAS ACTUALLY MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE.
I'm not going to defend a piece where the author contradicts the (clickbait) title in the body of the text, but he does actually say, plainly, that AI is useful for coding.
You didn't say what you're using it for, but since you're here, I'm guessing it's coding.
Go look at the graphs again. The “split by age” graph shows an increase in diagnosis of ~60%, but an increase in mortality of only ~10%. That’s not a small difference, and we aren’t that good at curing colon cancer.
GP’s hypothesis is one of the leading explanations for this trend, but of course gets rejected by advocates for colonoscopy. Taking into account error bars on these numbers (which author doesn’t show, because they are inconvenient to the argument being made), it seems at least somewhat likely that the explanation for the rise in younger cases is due to increased screening, with the “increased” mortality either being statistical noise, or misattribution of deaths that also would have occurred in earlier periods.
Another, related issue is that the takedown mechanism becomes a de facto censorship mechanism, as anyone who has dealt with DMCA takedowns and automated detectors can tell you.
Someone reports something for Special Pleading X, and you (the operator) have to ~instantly take down the thing, by law. There is never an equally efficient mechanism to push back against abuses -- there can't be, because it exposes the operator to legal risk in doing so. So you effectively have a one-sided mechanism for removal of unwanted content.
Maybe this is fine for "revenge porn", but even ignoring the slippery slope argument (which is real -- we already have these kinds of rules for copyrighted content!) it's not so easy to cleanly define "revenge porn".
DMCA isn't directly that bad. DMCA is under penalty of perjury, so false take downs are rare.
The problem is most take downs are not actually DMCA, they are some other non-legal process that isn't under any legal penalty. Though if it ever happens to you I suspect you have a good case against whoever did this - but the lawyer costs will far exceed your total gain. (as in spend $30 million or more to collect $100). Either we need enough people affected by a false non-DMCA take down that a class action can work (you get $0.50 but at least they pay something), or we need legal reform so that all take downs against a third party are ???
> DMCA is under penalty of perjury, so false take downs are rare.
Maybe true with the platonic ideal "DMCA takedown letter" (though these are rarely litigated, so who really knows), but as you note, they're incredibly common with things like the automated systems that scan for music in videos (and which actually are related to DMCA takedowns), "bad words" and the like.
> The problem is most take downs are not actually DMCA, they are some other non-legal process that isn't under any legal penalty.
It's true that most takedowns in the US aren't under DMCA, but even that once-limited process has metastasized into large, fully automated content scanning systems that proactively take down huge amounts of content without much recourse. Companies do this to avoid liability as part of safe harbor laws, or just to curry favor with powerful interests.
We're talking about US laws here, but in general, these kinds of instant-takedown laws become huge loopholes in whatever free speech provisions a country might have. The asymmetric exercise of rights essentially guarantees abuse.
I believe google issues legitimate dmca takedowns for copyright strikes, even when there is no infringement. They put the work to defend the strike on the apparent commiter, often with little to no detail.
While the false takedown may be rare. Using dmca as a mechanism to inflict pain where no copyright infringement has taken place is indeed common enough that it happens to small time youtubers like myself and others I have talked to.
> Sometimes I feel like this is taken to the extreme for non-scientists that say that lack of evidence is in itself evidence.
But of course, the lack of evidence is itself evidence, if you have a sufficiently large data sample and haven't seen the thing you're looking for. Keep pursuing the increasingly unlikely outcome, and you're just engaged in science-flavored religious catechism.
I see the fallacy routinely misapplied by all sides of most hot-button science-meets-politics issues. A great many scientists will regularly substitute their own pet theories for conclusions, and strenuously ignore the lack of supporting evidence, citing the old "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" saw. Then they turn around and mock "non-scientists" for doing the same thing. Neither side is right, of course, but dressing in a lab coat doesn't make it better.
Just to circle it back to the topic of science education, I'd love to see a science curriculum at the middle- and high-school level that equipped people to reason through this kind of thing by focusing on tearing apart pop research. A "science fair" is actually hard to do well just because most science fails, but a "scientific bullshit fair" would have almost infinite fertile ground from nutrition studies alone.
It's also really damned hard to come up with an interesting, novel question, that is testable, with resources available to the average school child, in a reasonable amount of time.
Allowing engineering opens up the workable space by quite a bit.
My brother and I, for example, did an experiment where we tested pH of various water bodies around us. The hypothesis was based off of local drainage patterns.
LLMs are the eternal September for software, in that the sort of people who couldn’t make it through a bootcamp can now be “programming thought leaders”. There’s no longer a reliable way to filter signal from noise.
Those 3000 early adopters who are bookmarking a trivial markdown file largely overlap with the sort of people who breathlessly announce that “the last six months of model development have changed everything!”, while simultaneously exhibiting little understanding of what has actually changed.
There’s utility in these tools, but 99% of the content creators in AI are one intellectual step above banging rocks together, and their judgement of progress is not to be trusted.
> Sometimes I just bookmark things because I think to myself “Maybe I’ll try this out, when I have time” which then likely never happens.
For me that’s 100% of the time. I only bookmark or star things I don’t use (but could be interesting). The things I do use, I just remember. If they used to be a bookmark or star, I remove it at that point.
I'm sure i'll piss off a lot of people with this one but I don't care any more. I'm calling it what it is.
LLMs empower those without the domain knowledge or experience to identify if the output actually solves the problem. I have seen multiple colleagues deliver a lot of stuff that looks fancy but doesn't actually solve the prescribed problem at all. It's mostly just furniture around the problem. And the retort when I have to evaluate what they have done is "but it's so powerful". I stopped listening. It's a pure faith argument without any critical reasoning. It's the new "but it's got electrolytes!".
The second major problem is corrupting reasoning outright. I see people approaching LLMs as an exploratory process and let the LLM guide the reasoning. That doesn't really work. If you have a defined problem, it is very difficult to keep an LLM inside the rails. I believe that a lot of "success" with LLMs is because the users have little interest in purity or the problem they are supposed to be solving and are quite happy to deliver anything if it is demonstrable to someone else. That would suggest they are doing it to be conspicuous.
So we have a unique combination of self-imposed intellectual dishonesty, mixed with irrational faith which is ultimately self-aggrandizing. Just what society needs in difficult times: more of that! :(
> LLMs are the eternal September for software, in that the sort of people who couldn’t make it through a bootcamp can now be “programming thought leaders”
Do you ever filter signal from noise by the quality of the code? The code written by the Google founders was eventually rewritten by others, and it was likely worse than what a fresh grad produces today. Still, that initial search engine is the most influential thing they ever built, and it's something the modern Bay Area will probably never create again.
The Markdown file looks like it’s written for people who either haven’t discovered Plan mode, or who can’t be bothered to read a generated plan before running with it.
Too early to tell, so let's wait and see before we brush that off.
>> in that the sort of people who couldn’t make it through a bootcamp can now be “programming thought leaders”
>Snobbery.
Reality and actually a selling point of AI tools. I see pretty often ads for making apps without any knowledge of programming
>> the sort of people who breathlessly announce
> Snobbery / Cliche.
Reality
>> There’s no longer a reliable way to filter signal from noise.
> Cliche.
Reality, or do you destinguish a well programmed app from unaudited BS
>> There’s utility in these tools, but 99% of the content creators in AI are one intellectual step above banging rocks together
>Cliche / Snobbery.
99% is to high, maybe 50%
>> their judgement of progress is not to be trusted
> Tell me, timr, how much judgement is there is in snotty gatekeeping and strings of cliches?
We have many security issues in software coded by people who have experience in coding, how much do you trust software ordered by people who can't jusge if the program they get is secure or full of security flaws?
Don't forget these LLMs are trained on pre existing faulty code.
> It's hard to communicate the difference the last 6 months has seen.
No, it isn't. The hypebeast discovered Claude code, but hasn't yet realized that the "let the model burn tokens with access to a shell" part is the key innovation, not the model itself.
I can (and do) use GH Copilot's "agent" mode with older generation models, and it's fine. There's no step function of improvement from one model to another, though there are always specific situations where one outperforms. My current go-to model for "sit and spin" mode is actually Grok, and I will splurge for tokens when that doesn't work. Tools and skills and blahblahblah are nice to have (and in fact, part of GH Copilot now), but not at all core to the process.
> No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.
When it came out, Github Copilot was an autocomplete tool. That's it. That may be what the OP was originally using. That's what I used... 2 years ago. That they change the capabilities but don't change the name, yet change names on services that don't change capabilities further illustrates the OP's point, I would say.
To be fair, Github Copilot (itself a horrible name) has followed the same arc as Cursor, from AI-enhanced editor with smart autocomplete, to more of an IDE that now supports agentic "vibe coding" and "vibe editing" as well.
I do agree that conceptually there is a big difference between an editor, even with smart autocomplete, and an agentic coding tool, as typified by Claude Code and other CLI tools, where there is not necessarily any editor involved at all.
Thanks... 2 years felt a bit too recent. I think I was trialing copilot in late 2022, and then got turned on to ... codeium/windsurf in late 2023. The years are merging together now. :/
That's silly. Gmail is a wildly different product than it was when it launched, but I guess it doesn't count since the name is the same?
Microsoft may or may not have a "problem" with naming, but if you're going to criticize a product, it's always a good starting place to know what you're criticizing.
The confusion is when I say “I have a terrible time using Copilot, I don’t recommend using it” and someone chimes in with how great their experience with Github Copilot is, a completely different product and how I must be “holding it wrong” when that is not the same Copilot. That Microsoft has like 5 different products all using Copilot in the name, even people in this very comment section are only saying “Copilot” so it is hard to know what product they are talking about!
I mean, sure. But aside from the fact that everything in AI gets reduced to a single word ("Gemini", "ChatGPT", "Claude") [1], it's clearly not an excuse for misrepresenting the functionality of the product when you're writing a post broadly claiming that their AI products don't work.
Github Copilot is actually a pretty good tool.
[1] Not just AI. This is true for any major software product line, and why subordinate branding exists.
I specifically mention that my experience is with the Office 365 Copilot and how terrible that is and in online discussions I mention this and then people jump out of the woodwork to talk about how great Github Copilot is so thank you for demonstrating that exact experience I have every time I mention Copilot :)
GitHub Copilot is available from website https://github.com/copilot together with services like Spark (not available from other places), Spaces, Agents etc.
This absolutely sucks, especially since tool calling uses tokens really really fast sometimes. Feels like a not-so-gentle nudge to using their 'official' tooling (read: vscode); even though there was a recent announcement about how GHCP works with opencode: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
No mention of it being severely gimped by the context limit in that press release, of course (tbf, why would they lol).
However, if you go back to aider, 128K tokens is a lot, same with web chat... not a total killer, but I wouldn't spend my money on that particular service with there being better options!
I mean, it's definitely not perfect, but consider that Claude is a 200k window (unless you're a beta user with access to more), and it's not the tragedy that you're making it out to be.
My experience is that the models all lose focus long before they fill their context window, so I'm not crying over the lower limit.
If it makes you feel any better, the problem you’re describing is as old as peer review. The authors of a paper only have to get accepted once, and they have a lot more incentive to do so than you do to reject their work as an editor or reviewer.
This is one of the reasons you should never accept a single publication at face value. But this isn’t a bug — it’s part of the algorithm. It’s just that most muggles don’t know how science actually works. Once you read enough papers in an area, you have a good sense of what’s in the norm of the distribution of knowledge, and if some flashy new result comes over the transom, you might be curious, but you’re not going to accept it without a lot more evidence.
This situation is different, because it’s a case where an extremely popular bit of accepted wisdom is both wrong, and the system itself appears to be unwilling to acknowledge the error.
Back when I listened to NPR, I shook my fist at the radio every time Shankar Vidantim came on to explain the latest scientific paper. Whatever was being celebrated, it was surely brand new. It's presentation on Morning Edition gave it the imprimature of "Proofed Science", and I imagined it getting repeated at every office lunch and cocktail party. I never heard a retraction.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
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