u/DynaBeast

I swear just the other day I and other people were complaining about how Opus 5 constantly used confusing and unparseable terminology in all of its communications, and how it would easily blow small issues way out of proportion. But today it feels much more chill. It talks smoother, doesn't shove in unnecessarily complicated or confusing terminology, and doesn't constantly latch onto speculative issues. It feels much more like talking to Fable, Sonnet, or 4.8. You think Anthropic released a stealth update to its personality?

TL;DR: LLMs not learning over time in comparison to how humans do learn makes people mistakenly believe that LLMs are getting dumber, when in reality they're just not getting smarter.

Every other week I see rampant posts from people claiming OpenAI, or Anthropic, or some other AI company deliberately "nerfed" their model performance to "save compute" or "encourage using the newer models". But that just doesn't make sense to me. None of these companies have ever explicitly stated that they've changed the underlying way their models work without an explicit fresh model release. Maybe they can reduce the compute allocation, but that wouldn't make the models dumber, it would just make your limits tighter or response speed slower. It's still the same bits under the hood.

So, are these constant posts about models being "shadow-nerfed" by their respective companies just delusional users who've started to see past their rose-tinted glasses once the novelty wears off? I actually think there's more to it than that, personally.

Humans are trained to talk in conversation mostly with other humans. In short bursts, a modern LLM can easily mimic the sensation of talking to another human. But over long stretches of time, there's actually a slow, small, impercetible drift that comes down to how humans and LLMs differ on a fundamental, architectural level. Over time, humans learn from their past experiences. They adopt new ideas, learn new speech patterns, correct from earlier mistakes, remember past events, and so on. LLMs are static. They exist in exactly one state permanently, and never change unless new memories are explicitly written into their context.

As humans, being used to talking to other humans, we expect this slow gradual change over time naturally, unconsciously, without thinking about it. People do change, and we've come to expect it. But when an LLM doesn't change over time, when it stays exactly the same indefinitely no matter how long you talk to it or have conversations with it, you might not pick up on that, but your unconscious mind starts to notice. It pins that lack of change up against the expected change that it typically experiences when talking to another human over a long period of time, and that drift appears to it as a degredation in performance.

In reality, its not the LLMs that are getting worse; it's that the humans they compete with are slowly getting better, over time. It's a sort of "intellectual inflation"; the average human sees their friends, family, coworkers, etc. slowly getting smarter and adapting better to their environment over time, while the LLM doesn't change; it just stays at exactly the same level of intellect as the first day you started talking to it. The baseline rose; the LLM didn't adapt to catch up to it. As such, its level of relative intellectual "buying power" fell over time perceptibly, even if the actual fixed amount of intellect it expresses never changed once.

And so, as a result, you get these droves of posts complaining about how OpenAI is "nerfing chatgpt", and despite the irrationality of the claim, tons of users self-report seeing the same phenomenon themselves.

What do you guys think about this?

Btw, none of this was written with AI at all, it's all completely stream of consciousness from my head. I just talk like this now because maybe I spend too much time talking to Claude. Apologies in advance for that.

gotta be one of my favorite genders 🙏

AI has been moving super super fast (what's new) and my boss recently put out a new declaration to us at work. He says that AI use is now mandatory, and we should use it as much as possible in all our workflows.

I'm a developer and I already make heavy use of claude code in my ide to do most or all planning and development tasks, 90+% of the work is offloaded to AI. But my boss wants us to take things even further. He wants us to stay on top of every major third party AI tool that releases, he says a new one comes out "once a month" and we need to stay on top of it if we want to keep up with competition.

My take on this is, all those AI tools just use the same apis in the backend: gemini, claude, chatgpt, etc., and serve it with a different flavor of UX. I have the strong opinion that as long as i'm using the same apis, i feel like there's really little added value by restricting myself to these third party tools which might be more generalized than a purpose-built, specific in-house tool that fits our unique business needs.

I talked about it with my boss, but he seemed to disagree, and thinks we should still be hard-rushing this, making sure we don't let any potential tool pass by our attention. He says that even if we dont end up using a tool, the concept behind it might be interesting to us to borrow ideas from.

He's a smart and discerning man, and I trust him, but I don't really know if I fully agree with his idea here. AI already moves so fast and does so much without my help, I can barely conceive of a tool I could find or make that would somehow make my workflow even faster or more efficient without bogging me down with extra overhead or unnecessary extraneous features. It just seems so absurd.

What are your guys' thoughts?

AI has been moving super super fast (what's new) and my boss recently put out a new declaration to us at work. He says that AI use is now mandatory, and we should use it as much as possible in all our workflows.

I'm a developer and I already make heavy use of claude code in my ide to do most or all planning and development tasks, 90+% of the work is offloaded to AI. But my boss wants us to take things even further. He wants us to stay on top of every major third party AI tool that releases, he says a new one comes out "once a month" and we need to stay on top of it if we want to keep up with competition.

My take on this is, all those AI tools just use the same apis in the backend: gemini, claude, chatgpt, etc., and serve it with a different flavor of UX. I have the strong opinion that as long as i'm using the same apis, i feel like there's really little added value by restricting myself to these third party tools which might be more generalized than a purpose-built, specific in-house tool that fits our unique business needs.

I talked about it with my boss, but he seemed to disagree, and thinks we should still be hard-rushing this, making sure we don't let any potential tool pass by our attention. He says that even if we dont end up using a tool, the concept behind it might be interesting to us to borrow ideas from.

He's a smart and discerning man, and I trust him, but I don't really know if I fully agree with his idea here. AI already moves so fast and does so much without my help, I can barely conceive of a tool I could find or make that would somehow make my workflow even faster or more efficient without bogging me down with extra overhead or unnecessary extraneous features. It just seems so absurd.

What are your guys' thoughts?

clod make me an app to play my favrit vame on fone so idon have to get up and go to my computer

clod make arg entity on my computer vrry mysterious and scawy so i can record and make big youtube money waow

clod edit the videos for me and make up funny titles for them too so ppl will watch and be amaze

clod substitute all my value as a human being for me and amke me toatally obsolete

the world is so very completely unserious

genuine clownshow at all levels

work is fake

socialization doesnt matter

government have no idea what they doing

everything is falling apart around us all and noke of us have any idea what to do or what to even care about

yes or no war? yes or no healthcare? yes or no unemployment? yes or no public trans? yes or no education? who knows

just do whatever

let it all burn

doesnt fucking matter anyhow

nothing matters

well all be dead or rrplaced sooner or later

live forever or die every day for the rest of your life until the end of tjme

maybe both

at the same time

wouldnt that be fun

at least maybe youd feel something i guess