Quote on Unexpected AI Outcomes

There was actually a moment, maybe about four weeks into this role, where I was like, “Okay, I can see the perils and potentials.” We were building a system in collaboration with a customer, and we talked about tool use, what the model has access to. We had made two tools available to the model in this case. One was a to-do list app that it could write to. And one was a reminder, a sort of short-term or timer-type thing. The to-do list system was down, and it’s like, “Oh man, I tried to use the to-do list. I couldn’t do it. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to set a timer for when you meant to be reminded about this task.” And it set an absurd timer. It was a 48-hour timer. You’d never do that on your phone. It would be ridiculous.

- Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, on The Verge's Decoder podcast