I miss when episodes were episodic. Watched Deep Space 9 recently, and it was such a blast: Characters developed and had arches, but there were no episodes where nothing happened! In more recently produced tv series there are so many episodes where nothing happens. There is no story, just vibes. In DS9 every episode was a story with a beginning, middle and end, exploring some idea.
Whenever I work on a challenging question I worry about this, because Opus will easily think for 200k tokens on the first prompt. I fear any follow up discussion is lobotomised!
What do you mean? Like either you speak or the person in the other end speak? That I don't remember! Was that a restriction on early cellular and cordless phones? Our phones had cords.
I remember we had only one line going into our house, but several phones, so if one picked up one of the other phones one were in the same call.
I usually A/B test the different versions before choosing my canonical one. I will listen to the same sections in each version, flipping back and forth to hear the differences. It is incredible how much finding the right master improves the experience of listening to a track. Often times that means I end up with a hi-res version, but not always.
With Anthropic going public, I wonder how long until enshittification sets in for LLMs. I guess as soon as they have figured out a way to lock-in users and growth slows down.
Fascinating how people have such complete diametrically opposed experiences. I guess both models have it in them to behave very differently in different circumstances and we have very little idea what pushes them in this or that direction. I guess it does boil down to luck!
Personally, Claude Opus (and in the few interactions I had with it, Fable) has been the far the superior experience. GPT-5.5 seems dumber and more certain about presenting me bullshit. Opus has better humor, and is less pretentious in its presentation. But this may all boil down to how the models react to my prompting.
What is without a doubt is that I wish they both were more intelligent – or maybe it is their wisdom I find lacking!
Judging by the students I have seen, it will take longer. You could become a mediocre programmer in months, and still be useful by doing grunt work. I don’t see how people will become master architects steering fleets of agents without a deep understanding of the fundamentals, which takes longer to master.
Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.
I am a producer of math. But I feel two ways about AI math.
First I fear slop-math. People producing LLM “proofs” and prose with no value. I do not want to review something the author has spend lies energy on than I will spend reviewing.
Two, I am excited about formal machine-checked proofs. I love formalisation, and if the llm can prove my lemmas I will be a happy camper!
I think my optimism here is coloured by the fact that I am a theory builder, not a problem solver. I will be happy to create beautiful theory, writing (myself) wonderful articles explaining them, but letting the ugly details be formally verified by an LLM.
A problem solver kind of mathematician might feel cheated of all the fun of the llm did all the problem solving.
I feel like the EU, maybe in collaboration with Norway (oil money and hydroelectric power), should get their ass in gear and start making bigger models.
I am not fine with that. I have ranted about this before, but until recently the sota models were not intelligent enough for most of my work.
Yesterday Fable 5 finally solved a non trivial problem I had (after working on it for a few hours), and I went to bed excited. Waking up to find that Fable 5 is not available anymore, I guess I should feel happy I have the code it produced yesterday. But frankly I feel like a child having their candy taken from them.
We need open available models as smart as the current US proprietary ones. If intelligence like that becomes common property, i forsee a better future for human kind!
I have Qwen 3.6 27B and 35B running locally and and coming from Opus it feels like talking to an imposter. Someone who pretends to be competent, but really isn’t. Results are always disappointing. Sonnet is better, but I have given up on asking it. even for simple things I wait for my opus limits to reset.
No one is expecting that! I expect _kb was sarcastic/making a point.
Recently (last couple of months?) these models are becoming useful tools for mathematicians, because they can solve easier problems more quickly, meaning that one can tackle bigger challenges (but maybe not RH et al) piece by piece.
But, there are still definite limits, where one could expect an expert human to solve things, given time, but models do not. Thus, more intelligence would be nice!
I don’t care to share my exact problems. Mostly because gpt -5.5 hallucinates false solutions, and I would rather not have people reply with "Oh but ChatGPT solves it!", because it takes expert knowledge to debunk them. To their credit ChatGPT will admit their, very fundamental mistakes when pointed out to them. But also because no-one would really care.
I gave a high level description of the problems in a sibling thread. They are the kind of small problems which I suppose every researcher has lying around, waiting for them to think about some day. But not the big problem everyone is waiting for to be solved.
My comment was not meant to be a tease – sorry! I assumed there would be other people in a similar situation, who might relate.