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 -
Speaking of taste, lately 4o has very much been passing the vibe check, and 3.7 Sonnet very much hasn't been.
I'm now using Claude almost exclusively as a workhorse and ChatGPT as more of a conversation partner, when it used to be the other way around. 4.5 is even better
Over the past year, especially towards the tail end, I've found myself becoming increasingly agnostic or apathetic between most leading models.
Grok 3? DeepSeek R1? Gemini 2.0 Pro? GPT-4o? o3 (mini)? Claude 3.5/3.7?
Almost any of them meet my needs, I occasionally want a reasoning model, or perhaps the Deep Research option, but in all honesty I just end up using whatever is handy. Grok 3 is probably the smartest model I can use for free, including reasoning and deep research. Beyond that, I wouldn't particularly care these days and just use whatever is easy. Which is often ChatGPT, or Gemini 2.0 Pro.
I've been pissed off enough by Anthropic's ridiculously low usage limits (and the negative experience of paid users to boot), that I don't usually bother.
You are correct, at least in my opinion, about GPT-4o recently getting a far more pleasant personality, to the point that Claude 3.7 doesn't strike me as glaringly superior. I don't really need to use them to write code unless I'm doing it for the hell of it, so your mileage might vary.
(This is a great situation! LLMs are being commodified, and tokens being given away for practically free. I'm used to being showered with a level of competency that would have had you once paying hundreds of dollars on API fees a year or more back.)
Very similar feeling for me.
I stick with ChatGPT for any research-type tasks, I use Grok for image generation and current events, and Claude covers anything else if I happen to be in the mood.
But I'm almost entirely agnostic as to which model is in front of me at any given moment, I feel like I know what I can get from them and when I should be careful about double-checking their outputs. They all hallucinate about the same amount, I'd say.
Which is crazy to think. Part of the promise of AI was that any company that obtained a significant lead in the space could in theory run away with the contest by leveraging their AI for higher efficiency.
Instead we've got all the major tech companies and even some second-tier players putting out approximately peer-level models and releasing improvements at approximately the same pace.
I am still prepared for one company to achieve a game-stealing breakthrough all at once, mind. But I am not going to pretend to guess which one. If you asked me ~2 years ago I'd have bet on OpenAI all the way.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I think that's accurate, and why I find the default personality to be more important now than ever. I can have any of them do the thing, but which one is going to format it nicely, explain at the verbosity level I prefer, match my informal tone without being cringe, etc. etc?
This is one place where ChatGPT makes things very easy with their memory feature. Claude has an equivalent, at least a style guide you can use, but it's more finicky in my limited experience.
If Grok and Gemini have an equivalent, I haven't found it, though I'm quite happy with their default responses.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link