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I've had a reasonable amount of hands on time with Claude Opus, and I would rate it as indistinguishable from GPT-4 in terms of usefulness, or at least I can't tell any obvious disparities after tens of thousands of tokens of conversation.
It is still however, more of a prude, at least as compared to GPT-4. I asked it to try extending an excerpt from a chapter from my novel, and it categorically refused because it included scenes of "body horror". GPT-4 didn't care.*
This is an improvement over Claude 2, or 2.1, but only because those were beaten into nigh uselessness.
(I'm ever curious as to when an AI can write fiction in my style as well as I can, because then I'm going to fucking retire, but that day is not today. Best guess is 1-2 years.)
In other words, I think Claude 3 isn't really a breakthrough (barring the long context window, and no degradation in quality with it according to needle in the haystack assessment, if you need it), but at least there is a legitimate GPT-4 competitor out there. I'd love to evaluate Gemini Ultra myself, but I'm not going to pay for it, but so far GPT-4 being about two years old if counting from completion of initial training, suggests that OAI still has a massive lead and they'd be retarded if they squandered it.
What excites me more than Clod (a less deserved nickname now, admittedly) or Gemini themselves is that they'll likely prompt OAI to launch the next GPT, be it something called 4.5 or an outright 5. Or at least do it sooner instead of milking 4 I guess.
Edit: Mf hasn't even heard of my book, though it should be within the knowledge cutoff in late 2023. Guess they're not scraping Royal Road or it's too niche to remember.
*I've evaluated it in other ways, and once again my takeaway is "GPT-4 parity". That includes applied Bayesian Reasoning and arcane questions about orbital mechanics and megastructures. I had both GPT-4 and Claude Opus crosscheck each other, and they both concluded the other was doing a good job.
So, if I'm only going to pay for one, ChatGPT4 or Opus, is it worth switching from ChatGPT4?
Not really. I haven't run into any task that Opus could perform but GPT-4 couldn't, at least in a reasonable amount of testing. And the latter is more flexible IMO, at least in terms of content guidelines, even if neither is perfect on those grounds.
ChatGPT paid certainly has more perks like DALLE and customs GPTs and plug-ins , depending on how you value those. But the core product, in the form of the intelligence and competency of the AI assistant, is much the same so I wouldn't change if one wasn't significantly cheaper.
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Shorter timeline than that. Playing with Gemini 1.5 a few weeks ago, I could upload an entire book (substantial ones, e.g. Perdido Street Station, Gravity's Rainbow), give it a basic plot skeleton of a new book, and prompt it to write a couple paragraphs in the style of the author, and it succeeds. There are still some prose issues, but you'd absolutely be able to tell exactly which author it's simulating (sometimes to the point of parody).
Overarching plot structure it's weaker at, though.
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