Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
This came up in a podcast I listen to:
WaPo: "OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say "
archive link https://archive.is/E3M2p
While Iām not prepared to defend OpenAI here I suspect this is just to shut up the most hysterical employees who still actually believe theyāre building the P(doom) machine.
I mean, if you play on the doom to hype yourself, dealing with employees that take that seriously feel like a deserved outcome.
Short story: itās smoke and mirrors.
Longer story: This is now how software releases work I guess. Alot is running on open aiās anticipated release of GPT 5. They have to keep promising enormous leaps in capability because everyone else has caught up and thereās no more training data. So the next trick is that for their next batch of models they have āsolvedā various problems that people say you canāt solve with LLMs, and they are going to be massively better without needing more data.
But, as someone with insider info, itās all smoke and mirrors.
The model that āsolvedā structured data is emperically worse at other tasks as a result, and I imagine the solution basically just looks like polling multiple response until the parser validates on the other end (so basically itās a price optimization afaik).
The next large model launching with the new Q* change tomorrow is āapproaching agi because it can now reliably count lettersā but actually itās still just agents (Q* looks to be just a cost optimization of agents on the backend, thatās basically it), because the only way it can count letters is that it invokes agents and tool use to write a python program and feed the text into that. Basically, it is all the things that already exist independently but wrapped up together. Interestingly, theyāre so confident in this model that they donāt run the resulting python themselves. Itās still up to you or one of those LLM wrapper companies to execute the likely broken from time to time code to umā¦ checks notes count the number of letters in a sentence.
But, by rearranging what already exists and claiming it solved the fundamental issues, OpenAI can claim exponential progress, terrify investors into blowing more money into the ecosystem, and make true believers lose their mind.
Expect more of this around GPT-5 which they promise āIs so scary they canāt release it until after the electionsā. My guess? Itās nothing different, but they have to create a story so that true believers will see it as something different.
Yeah, Iām not in any doubt that the C-level and marketing team are goosing the numbers like crazy to keep the buuble from bursting, but I also think theyāre the ones that are most cognizant of the fact that ChatGPT is definitely not the Doom Machine. But I also believe they have employees who they cannot fire because they would spread a hella lot doomspeak if they did, who are True Believers.
Part of me suspects they probably also arenāt the sharpest knives in OpenAIās drawer.
It can be both. Like, probably OpenAI is kind of hoping that this story becomes wide and is taken seriously, and has no problem suggesting implicitly and explicitly that their employeeās stocks are tied to how scared everyone is.
Remember when Altman almost got outed and people got pressured not to walk? That their options were at risk?
Strange hysteria like this doesnāt need just one reason. It just needs an input dependency and ambiguity, the rest takes of itself.
Well, itās now yesterdayās tomorrow and while thereās an update Iām not seeing a Q* announcement.
My understanding is that it was renamed or rebranded to Strawberry which itself nebulous marketting maybe itās the new larger model or maybe itās GPT-5 or maybeā¦
itās all smoke and mirrors. I think my point is, they made some cost optimizations and mostly moved around things that existed, and theyāll keep doing that.
OH
I first saw this then later saw the āopenai employees tweeted šā and thought the latter was them being cheeky dipshits about the former. admittedly I didnāt look deeper (because ugh)
but this is even more hilarious and dumb
Iām not seeing a Strawberry announcement either.