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 you’ll near-instantly regret.
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If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t 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 I'm not prepared to defend OpenAI here I suspect this is just to shut up the most hysterical employees who still actually believe they're building the P(doom) machine.
Short story: it's smoke and mirrors.
Longer story: This is now how software releases work I guess. Alot is running on open ai's anticipated release of GPT 5. They have to keep promising enormous leaps in capability because everyone else has caught up and there's no more training data. So the next trick is that for their next batch of models they have "solved" various problems that people say you can't solve with LLMs, and they are going to be massively better without needing more data.
But, as someone with insider info, it's all smoke and mirrors.
The model that "solved" 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 it's a price optimization afaik).
The next large model launching with the new Q* change tomorrow is "approaching agi because it can now reliably count letters" but actually it's still just agents (Q* looks to be just a cost optimization of agents on the backend, that's 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, they're so confident in this model that they don't run the resulting python themselves. It's still up to you or one of those LLM wrapper companies to execute the likely broken from time to time code to um... 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 "Is so scary they can't release it until after the elections". My guess? It's nothing different, but they have to create a story so that true believers will see it as something different.
Well, it's now yesterday's tomorrow and while there's an update I'm not seeing a Q* announcement.
My understanding is that it was renamed or rebranded to Strawberry which itself nebulous marketting maybe it's the new larger model or maybe it's GPT-5 or maybe...
it's all smoke and mirrors. I think my point is, they made some cost optimizations and mostly moved around things that existed, and they'll keep doing that.
OH
I first saw this then later saw the "openai employees tweeted 🍓" and thought the latter was them being cheeky dipshits about the former. admittedly I didn't look deeper (because ugh)
but this is even more hilarious and dumb
I'm not seeing a Strawberry announcement either.