It’s a common confusion, often subconsciously deployed in the context of trying to cope with the possibility of something undesirable turning out to be true.
That’s because we’re in a recession. It has nothing to do with AI. AI can’t replace a god damn drive thru worker. McDonald’s literally tried and failed, that’s the funny part.
No dude, the latest versions of the models it routes to are markedly poorer in performance than their predecessors.
I’m observing a law that states: There appears to be a direct relationship between model performance and cost, such that whenever a company claims to have reduced inference costs, customers immediately notice a corresponding decline in model performance.
Ok but didn’t Karpathy make it clear that we live in the vibe era? I’m inclined to trust vibes more than technical jargon, and boy are the vibes off with what’s been happening!
This actually proves my point because if you read the anecdotes, you will notice a marked decline in performance. The version number goes up but the actual performance declines. The benchmarks can tell any story you want them to.
Maybe not in theory but definitely in practice, as we’ve seen with GPT-5. These companies are lightning money on fire. If they reduce the cost, expect a proportional decrease in quality. All of the GPT-5 anecdotes confirm this. When the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right, and the data is usually bullshit.
It’s already obvious that it will be a scam. Higher benchmark scores and lower cost are two signs that customers are about to get scammed. We saw it with GPT-5.