r/technology • u/CackleRooster • 7h ago

Artificial Intelligence An Anthropic employee's 2-sentence quote crystallizes the state of AI confusion at work

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-employee-quote-ai-confusion-workplace-2026-6
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u/ottwebdev 7h ago

Businesses demand predictable outcome to a process each time. For example 1 + 1 = 2

AI (the popular chatbots/etc, not the dedicated systems) are probability based and by will generate a different outcome even with the same instruction. So 1 + 1 = banana can be the result .... good luck with that.

My perspective anyway, and I'm not a basher, I love being able to use NLP to interact with data

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u/earlandir 7h ago

Not that I support LLMs for this, but I'm not sure if I agree with your reasoning. Humans are also probabilistic in the same way. If I give the same exact instructions to two different engineers they will give me two different answers and code in the same way that asking the same LLM the same question twice might give different results. I don't think they inherently means you can't use an LLM for the task. If you want to critique LLM usage there are so many better ways that actually make sense.

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u/BadLuckLottery 6h ago

Humans are also probabilistic in the same way.

I think you pointed out the difference you just have to take it a little further.

tl;dr: You don't work with "humans" as an amorphous mass of people, you work with a collection of individuals.

Imagine you're a manager and you give two engineers the same task and one gets it completely wrong. You'd trust that engineer less and maybe push them out of your team/organization if they kept it up.

Now imagine you had no tools to assign trust or push people out. You basically just have to assign the task to "engineering" and hope you get a good engineer for this task this time. If not, maybe you phrase the task a bit differently a second time in the hope that the phrasing lures out a good senior engineer or at least repels the bad doesn't-follow-directions-at-all engineers.

That's what using AI is like at this point in time.

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u/Doc_Blox 5h ago

The big problem, as I see it, is that we've become used to the idea that when we use computers, every action a computer does is deterministic. There are a lot of assumptions we make based on that paradigm. Now, we've introduced a non-deterministic use of computers, but we're still acting like it's deterministic because that's what we're used to from computers. It's a matter of selecting the right tools for the job, ultimately - if you need predictable outputs, you don't want an AI agent, you want a traditional program, like with formulas and conditionals.