also when someone says you just have to prompt it a certain way it reminds me of people who think they can get better results out of a slot machine by pressing buttons in a certain order
The providers of these models also design the UX similarly to slot machines (run it x amount of times for better results, multiplying your spend) this isnt a coincidence and they're playing into the gambler mentality, and probably hire UX designers that specialize in this.
Of course the closed Anthropic would never share this, it would definitely take away the 'magic' feeling of the AI
Are those dials set the same across all hardware configurations and clusters? Does model behavior average out the same across different hardware?
There are just too many different buttons that can be set to really trust a provider either not to directly commit fraud, or indirectly commit fraud with system complexity affecting the output.
But I agree with your general point. One of the reasons subscription plans are cheaper because they modulate usage in this way based on demand. They can also recover compute more coarsely via usage resets (which give positive PR).
The progress however is such that the number of tasks that you can do with >p% automated and X=1 keeps increasing. So many times just waiting works. Of course, here also it changes from field to field. There are some tasks at which AI hasn't even gotten started, others where it has already peaked, others where it's increasing slowly, and others where it's increasing fast.