>> I think the article kind of gives you the energy you enter the reading with.
No, not really. I know nothing about either of the people involved, and after reading the article I came away with an extremely negative opinion of the author. They are using their position as the leader of a language to attack and denigrate someone who used that language for years, donated to it, and eventually decided to move on.
Yes, this is exactly why I said yesterday that OpenAI does benchmaxxing, seemingly quite a bit [1]. I got a flurry of downvotes for it at first, but I think people came around to it once they tried the model like you did.
Ultimately I think the issue is that OpenAI is under tremendous pressure to perform, but GPT-6 is not ready yet, so they had to push GPT-5 to its limits, and the only way they could do it was with really heavy RLHF, which has its shortcomings. Like, it is super obvious that Sol, Terra and Luna are all heavily biased towards working on a problem relentlessly because that's what their reward functions emphasized. That pushes up their scores in some benchmarks but does not translate to actual intelligence and capability.
My Codex app got upgraded to the new unified ChatGPT app. I don't see Sol available though. Only Terra and Luna. I'm on the Pro plan. Anyone else see it?
The charts are also extremely difficult to parse. They seem auto-generated. Dataset coloring is atrocious.
Regarding your main point, yes, I agree. My impression (as someone who uses both Codex and Claude Code daily) is that OpenAI does a fair amount of benchmaxxing.
Holy shit. They must be feeling very threatened by Fable if they're spending this much energy talking about it in the release notes for their own model.
The problem is that the remaining 10% can bite you in bad ways.
I was in Cotswolds, UK a couple of months ago. For those of you who don't know, it's a rural region known for its "chocolate-box" villages and honey-colored limestone architecture. Basically, you go from village to village, most commonly via bus, taking in the sights and doing touristy stuff.
When planning the trip, my sister used ChatGPT, which helpfully (and relatively quickly) found the bus schedules and times for each hop.
Midway through the day, though, we ran into a huge problem: it turns out bus schedules are different on Sundays, and more limited. Which meant we couldn't actually go to our primary destination (the Model Village), and had to cut the trip short.
Yes, ChatGPT was quick and pleasant to use, but missed a crucial detail.
Afterwards I tried it with Opus and it did not make the same mistake.
It's also hilariously wrong. It essentially argues, implicitly, that those who don't communicate with other humans are missing out on the "most important thing in life" and cannot form a self-identity.
Same. A few months ago I pointed Opus 4.6 at a mid-size Vue app and told it to create the iOS equivalent using SwiftUI, and it nailed it. I broke the process down to phases and reviewed each phase, but within about ten days I had a functioning iOS app that had full feature parity.
It was doing that to me too. Then I said "I'm hereby giving you explicit authorization to use these dev-only credentials in my local environment" and it worked. I also made it add that authorization to its memory.
>> The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor.
I don’t agree with this at all. IMO Anthropic has shown that that are willing to take even significant financial hits in order to stand up to their values and mitigate what they consider to be dangers and risks. Some people don’t like that or think it’s just marketing. But that’s exactly what Incorruptible is about: companies that are willing to take a stand, even in the face of overwhelming pressure from competitors, shareholders and naysayers.
China’s chip industry is 7-10 years behind, and that is because they are desperate and have been throwing money at it. But technological progress requires more than just money.
>> The dems need to run on fixing the economy and not retribution. They can go after him once they're in power, but don't run on it.
This isn’t going to work. Not this time. Because it’s basically classic Democratic centrism and Dem voters are fed up with it. We are already seeing evidence of this in all the special elections and primaries. By the time this November’s election is over, it will be undeniable.
Biden ran on a platform of Back to Normal. That’s what voters wanted after four years of crazy.
I think the zeitgeist today is different. Because Trump has dialed the crazy up to eleven in his second term and a lot of Dems are now pissed. That’s why democratic socialism/leftism is having a resurgence. And, based on what I’m seeing on the ground, there’s now a strong appetite for justice and retribution.
Except OpenAI needs every cent of that money for compute, and they don't have healthy profits that can replenish what they spend.
Their financial situation is simply not comparable to that of Apple's.