Because failures compound. My productivity has substantially improved since I switched from open models to a Codex subscription, because it doesn't need hand holding, and it doesn't pull stupid tricks occasionally.
The state of the art is moving so rapidly that, yeah, Copilot by Microsoft using gpt-5-mini:low is not going to be very good. And there are many places where AI has been implemented poorly, generally by people who have the distribution to force it upon many people. There are also plenty of people who use vibe coding tools and produce utterly atrocious codebases. That doesn't preclude the existence of effective AI tools, and people who are good at using them.
This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression through scientific and engineering arguments.
It's also moaning about me coming from a datacentre IP (proxy) with some vague complaints about load introduced by AI crawlers. I think this guy treats "protecting" his site as a hobby.
Is there a reason we would need to coordinate on what to exchange rather than, say, beginning with encyclopedias and textbooks then moving to a constant stream of notable papers, news, discoveries, etc? What kind of bandwidth can you hit with a cooperating neighbour where improvements become civilisationally important? How many bytes (megabytes? Terabytes?) of meaningful new data does humanity produce per second? I suspect it's reasonably low.
I never quite got what was so "hot" about it. There seems to be an entire parallel ecosystem of corporates that are just begging to turn AI into PowerPoint slides so that they can mould it into a shape that's familiar.
I think using total parameters is fair, it correlates well with the RAM prerequisites to run it. Otherwise Kimi K2 would be "small" despite being a trillion parameters!
Personally I prefer Gemini because I still use AI via chat windows, and it can do a good ~90k tokens before it starts getting stupid. I'm yet to find an agent that's actually useful, and doesn't constantly fuck up everywhere while burning money.
The Bristol young lib dems oppose it, but the parliamentary party doesn't think it goes far enough. The Bristol lot are great, I talked to them about it, but they're unlikely to change things on the national level.
Language Transfer is great. On the topic of immersion, I made https://nuenki.app in my gap year. It estimates the difficulty of sentences in webpages and translates the ones at your knowledge level into the language you're learning.
I just started uni, so mostly that. I've found myself making a little CLI for the timetable website and using a software defined radio so I can hear the lecturer while still having noise cancelling.