This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's a coder's model I think, not a gooner's model. And I think we're only going to get the monkey models at this point. The Soviets had export versions of their tanks made with shit steel and without the good optics. They didn't want their full abilities to be exposed. Plus the export versions were cheaper, suitable for mass production.
OpenAI has the compute to train really big models, they don't have the compute to make them available to the hoi-polloi. There are already pretty prohibitive rate-limits on the new o1. And they don't want to expensively let other companies inference out and replicate their models, which may be why they're concealing the true chain of thought.
I have no hopes for GPT in the latter department anyway, but my point stands, I think this is a remarkably mundane development and isn't nearly worth the glazing it gets. The things I read on basket weaving forums do not fill me with confidence either. Yes, it can solve fairly convoluted riddles, no shit - look at the fucking token count, 3k reasoning tokens for one no-context prompt (and I bet that can grow as context does, too)! Suddenly the long gen times, rate limits and cost increase make total sense, if this is what o1 does every single time.
Nothing I'm seeing so far disproves my intuition that this is literally 4o-latest but with a very autistic CoT prompt wired under the hood that makes it talk to itself in circles until it arrives at a decent answer. Don't get me wrong, this is still technically an improvement, but the means by which they arrived at it absolutely reeks of crutch coding (or crutch prompting, rather) and not any actual increase in model capabilities. I'm not surprised they have the gall to sell this (at a markup too!) but color me thoroughly unimpressed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link