Their own tweets are also pretty eyebrow-raising:

> One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work.

Why would you offer another researcher the lead authorship on your groundbreaking paper if you thought you had developed it independently?

And why cannot they have someone associated with Anthropic as co-author? That’s not obvious at all. For sure they would prefer to be the only ones, but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies, even if they are technically competitors. What is inappropriate about it?

because it severely dilutes the PR value.

If writing up the paper would involve using OpenAI's unreleased model, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic would be happy about Alpöge having that access.

would edit my comment but it's been a few hours

> but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies

that's only true for papers that are not millenium problem solutions

in another world this could have been a beautiful collaboration

It's inappropriate if you're a sociopath.

IIRC that happened with evolution. In the initial presentation of Darwin and Wallace's work on evolution (presented with their consent by someone else) Wallace was described as the primary author since he was planning to publish first.

Of course, no one understood that presentation so it was Darwin's later book that everyone remembers

Holy late capitalism. Everything revolves around line-go-up, and sociopaths rule the show. These people cannot even collaborate like civilised scientists on one of the most famous open problems in mathematics?

“It would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” I cannot believe this shit.

Soon Levent will just be turned into soylent and he will have never been an Anthropic employee. We still need some progress here though.

AI seems to compound this issue. One person can appear incredibly productive, say by submitting a huge volume of PRs, but that can slow down the rest of the team by deluging them with PRs and operational issues that they have to solve.

This is why I strongly like on-call.

A lot of people hate it, but if you have a rotation, that will force this person to deal with what they create during their rotations, and the operational issues will be an explicit part of your job when you're dealing with them.

When it kind of goes to random people, the conscientious people who fix the bugs and operational issues look unproductive, and the aggressive people throwing slop over the wall who never bother look great.

Forcing this through a rotating cast, and having other people not worry about it unless management decides it's too much for one person and they need help during this rotation, really avoids some of the most toxic outcomes around this.

On-call doesn't have to mean someone is getting paged at 3am. It does mean everyone rotates through, and it is clear who has the monkey, so you don't have passive-aggressive vs. conscientious behavior hiding issues like that.

This is just wrong. A lot of people take tremendous pride in their work. Particularly highly-skilled people who have been doing the work for a long time.

Joe Biden used to say this all the time - that a job is more than a paycheck, it's an identity and a sense of purpose, often a big part of our social lives as well. Or if you prefer the other side, Trump likes to say that coal miners don't want to learn computers, they want their coal mining jobs back.

With one colleague, I was leaving PR comments and he would just put my feedback into the AI and paste its response. So I decided to cut out the middleman and now I just @cursor and tell it to trim unnecessarily long comments.

Of all the things in this thread - this is the one that grinds my gears the most. Colleagues that believe it’s ok to reply with unedited garbage when you engage with them as a human.

I don’t think we need to write code anymore unless we want to - but we DO need to be humans, and respect the time of other people.

One coworker had their agent respond to me, with "from Claude : robot emoji:" at the end, that made me mad.

Then another coworker just pasted the Claude response with no signature and no comment and no context as if they had written it themself. That made me livid. I used to like that guy. No respect anymore.

Please provide a source. Also, are you also so sneering about the famine relief and AIDS treatment work that USAID was doing?

It's really important to define what "people who can leverage AI" means. I've found that using AI judiciously with close human supervision provides an advantage, but using the latest models with the latest harnesses can look like it's giving you a huge advantage superficially while actually costing you more time in the long run.

That's hard to define, but I measure it as how quickly people reach for AI for complex, tedious tasks. Let's say you're doing market research for a car to buy. A person who doesn't use AI, might just ask ChatGPT, but many websites block searches like that now. Someone who uses CC or Codex could ask it and it will use curl to get the live data and make a HTML you can browse.

Another is someone making a workout plan or a meal plan. Coders will ask AI to make a plan and add it to their calendar using GOG Cli. It's a fundamental shift in thinking and that hasn't diffused to the mass public yet. But just like the internet, it will get to them eventually. In the mean time, those who leverage AI like that will have an advantage.

If you're already trending towards 10x developer status in a niche area of programming, sure, AI will secretly make you less productive (in that niche) while making you feel like you're going faster, for a little while.

For everyone and every other situation, hard disagree.

We're currently wasting a lot of time cleaning up slop created by overusing AI. The loop is: developer uses AI to create a huge amount of code very quickly. But the developer didn't understand the underlying system very well so the specs generated by the AI contain a lot of faulty assumptions and the code was then built on those assumptions. So you have features that probably shouldn't have existed in the first place, but because they do exist people have provided feedback on them, and the developer then uses the AI to implement that feedback, but still doesn't understand the system so much of the code for the revisions is still wrong. So that individual developer saw a huge productivity increase, in the sense that he generated a vast amount of code really quickly, but the team as a whole saw a productivity decrease.

Ironic plot twist, AI is just exposing your coworker's weakness. They could slow down and understand before blasting away at code, or explicitly hang back and generate tech demos/PoCs for architectural choices while building understanding, but they didn't. The only reason things were ok before was because they were handicapped to a speed slower than their ability to figure things out.

Is it a weakness of the individual or is it a systemic issue where management sees how fast a single task can be "completed" with AI so they set goals that can only be achieved if you offload everything to AI and then fall into the trap I described above.

If management isn't giving people enough time to verify work, that's on them. If management is giving people enough time, but saying "go fast" and people interpret that as "YOLO" that's on the employee.

There are so many other factors. Will people be pissed if they expected your output and got AI slop instead? Will you lose context on something that you really need to understand?

There are so many contradictions in this statement that either the person who wrote it is completely muddle-headed, or just a bad liar.

> Nothing about our core business has changed – it remains strong and consistent

a few paragraphs later

> But our transformation is going to take time

and the next paragraph

> At the same time, the market in which we operate has undergone profound change over the last 6 months. We need to adjust our cost structure

So is the business strong and consistent, or is it facing a rapidly-changing market, requiring that the business transform and adjust it's cost structure?

> To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans.

A few paragraphs later

> AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.

So do you think AI doesn't replace humans, or do you think that you'll need fewer humans because AI will be doing more of the work?

AI prompt: “Write a melodramatic layoff announcement that blames our problems on vague market/economic changes, suggests we need to transform, yet reassures investors that business fundamentals are strong.”

If we throw all the arguments at the wall, one must stick right?

I think it's a bit more sinister. If they write everything they can claim later they "considered" it.

Nothing in there contradicts. A business that works well today may not work well tomorrow; it's management's job to change the business to better meet future conditions.

> or do you think that you'll need fewer humans because AI will be doing more of the work?

My bet is this one. To be fair, it isn't exactly an unpopular opinion. If I were starting a business today I'd plan to hire far fewer programmers than I would have just 2-3 years ago.

They quoted text declaring both that things haven't changed, and that things have changed. There is a basic contradiction there.

One which is present in a lot of layoff messages. Things are fine! Don't worry! Half the staff has to go because things aren't fine though.

I think this is a category error. Homer is the iconic writer of the Ancient Greek language and culture, not the modern nation of Greece. Cervantes and Dante are the iconic writers in the Spanish and Italian languages, respectively, not the nations of Spain or Italy. Italy wouldn't even exist as a nation until 500 years after Dante.

The American equivalent of Homer, Dante, or Cervantes is Shakespeare.

Do you consider Frost inaccessible (or for that matter politically-charged)? I think every kid who grows up in New England reads him in elementary or middle school.