Ha yeah I feel like I have to write a five paragraph essay to make claude look at a contentious topic with fresh eyes.
Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"
They have, but even with the whole CCP backing you you can't just catch up on the chip war overnight. It's going to take time to get their memory and compute industries where they need to be. Meanwhile, barring an invasion of Taiwan, US will have Rubin class models and then whatever the next tier is, within 3 years.
Anthropic is really speedrunning their evil arc as fast as possible. Can't use them for basic LLM research, cybersecurity, or beyond-surface-level discussions of biology and virology, but Anthropic is allowed to sell Claude to the trump administration to kidnap maduro and to bomb iran. And don't get me started on that $100M autonomous killer drone swarm contract that they applied to and rationalized as non autonomous...
Yeah but they might still have an unreleased bigger pretrain than 5.5. (but maybe not). still 5.5 is smarter than opus 4.8 IME, so you're only losing the mythos tier (fable). and all the cool fun stuff i'd want to use fable for our blocked (can't have it do even defensive cybersecurity work [in theory you can but the classifiers fire like crazy], can't discuss stuff like the furin cleavage site of sars-cov-2, etc)
Anthropic is losing a ton of goodwill by not being more honest about their constraints. They've been buckling under load for months, and instead of doing the most honest thing (keep weekly usage limits same, make 5 hour usage limits have surge pricing where the usage-cost of X tokens is scaled based on dynamic load), they're doing a lot of hacky things to try to get a similar effect. I suspect they feel the optics of being honest would be too bad, so instead it's a slow bleed where they piss off users one by one
I'm normally suspicious but honestly they've been so massively supply-constrained that I don't think it really benefits them much. They're not worried about getting enough demand for the new models; they're worrying about keeping up with it.
Granted, there's a small counterargument for mythos which is that it's probably going to be API-only not subscription
Undercover mode seems like a way to make contributions to OSS when they detect issues, without accidentally leaking that it was claude-mythos-gigabrain-100000B that figured out the issue
somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).
BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
On the topic of micro-dosing, I microdosed around 3-6ug LSS/day for 1.5 years. Stopped abruptly one day and haven’t used it since. So echoing your sentiment about how easy it is to stop.
Just wanted to mention that 50ug of LSD tartrate is very noticeable. A 100ug tab is a surprisingly strong tab.
Source: have worked directly with LSD crystal in the past. (Unfortunately anecdotes are king when it comes to illicit drugs otherwise I’d be able to cite an actual external source)
Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"