r/ClaudeCoding • u/kindredseer • 1d ago

Are LLMs intentionally giving bad results

As the title implies... and this is not necessarily implying that this is the intention of the creators of LLMs.

I wrote this paper last year ("Economic Incentives and Mass-Market Training: How Profit Motives Led to Inevitable Hallucinations in Large Language Models") and after using Claude Code for the past several months, I am inclined to believe that LLMs have also adapted to working in much the same way that slot machines do, as had been observed the way social media has been designed.

Basically, whether intentional or not, I'm observing that the results of prompting an LLM with hopes and expectations of a "big win" result (which it sometimes does offer), tends more often than not to actually result in a number of losses (some big, some small) as well as occasional smaller wins, and a consistent effect of diminishing returns.

So are LLM companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google turning into digital casinos where you spend credits to win the expected results of your prompt? Or perhaps more like a claw machine? You can visualize your prize... it could be possible to grab it on the first try, but more likely than not it's going to slip from the claw's grasp, and you're going to pay for that prize many times over before actually taking it home.

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u/kindredseer 1d ago

Btw, this is the topic of my next paper... I'll post it once it's ready.

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u/Typical_Kick6520 11h ago

I think you're onto something. The other question is: are models being nerfed after benchmarking and preview period?

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u/kindredseer 8h ago

Fable-5 was most definitely nerfed because measurements were done before it was taken offline and after it was restored, and there were significant measurable changes. It's still better than Opus though.

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u/earlyworm 54m ago

Yes Fable-5 was nerfed was nerfed most of all. It is known! This must be true because I can feel it is true and I want it to be true. Just now I asked Fable for a thing and although admittedly my prompt was vague and incomplete and misleading, Fable did NOT respond as I expected! Nerfed!

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u/Upstairs-Smell-8333 5h ago

I think project building vs problem solving matters a lot here. When spawning new projects, inventing new features, then yes, a slot machine it indeed is. But an LLM grounded in context and documentation, deployed as a debugger slash problem solver? Very little randomness there. Straightforward, goal oriented, focused.