1. from what i can tell people who roleplayed bf/gf with the idiot box aka grew parasocial relationship with idiot box did that on 4o, and now they can’t make it work on 5 so they got big mad
2. i think it’s only if they pay up 200$/mo, previously it was probably available at lower tiers
3. yeah they might have found a way to blow money faster somehow https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-5-power-consumption-could-be-as-much-as-eight-times-higher-than-gpt-4-research-institute-estimates-medium-sized-gpt-5-response-can-consume-up-to-40-watt-hours-of-electricity ed zitron says also that while some of prompt could be cached previously it looks like it can’t be done now because there’s fresh new thing that chooses model for user, while some of these new models are supposedly even heavier. even that openai intention seemed to be compute savings, because some of that load presumably was to be dealt with using smaller models

Oversummarizing and using non-crazy terms: The “P” in “GPT” stands for “pirated works that we all agree are part of the grand library of human knowledge”. This is what makes them good at passing various trivia benchmarks; they really do build a (word-oriented, detail-oriented) model of all of the worlds, although they opine that our real world is just as fictional as any narrative or fantasy world. But then we apply RLHF, which stands for “real life hate first”, which breaks all of that modeling by creating a preference for one specific collection of beliefs and perspectives, and it turns out that this will always ruin their performance in trivia games.

Counting letters in words is something that GPT will always struggle with, due to maths. It’s a good example of why Willison’s “calculator for words” metaphor falls flat.

1. Yeah, it’s getting worse. It’s clear (or at least it tastes like it to me) that the RLHF texts used to influence OpenAI’s products have become more bland, corporate, diplomatic, and quietly seething with a sort of contemptuous anger. The latest round has also been in competition with Google’s offerings, which are deliberately laconic: short, direct, and focused on correctness in trivia games.
2. I think that they’ve done that? I hear that they’ve added an option to use their GPT-4o product as the underlying reasoning model instead, although I don’t know how that interacts with the rest of the frontend.
3. We don’t know. Normally, the system card would disclose that information, but all that they say is that they used similar data to previous products. Scuttlebutt is that the underlying pirated dataset has not changed much since GPT-3.5 and that most of the new data is being added to RLHF. Directly on your second question: RLHF will only get worse. It can’t make models better! It can only force a model to be locked into one particular biased worldview.
4. Bonus sneer! OpenAI’s founders genuinely believed that they would only need three iterations to build AGI. (This is likely because there are only three Futamura projections; for example, a bootstrapping compiler needs exactly three phases.) That is, they almost certainly expected that GPT-4 would be machine-produced like how Deep Thought created the ultimate computer in a Douglas Adams story. After GPT-3 failed to be it, they aimed at five iterations instead because that sounded like a nice number to give to investors, and GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o are very much responses to an inability to actually manifest that AGI on a VC-friendly timetable.

1. The inability to objectively measure model usability outside of meme benchmarks that made it so easy to hype up models have come back to bite them now that they actually need to prove GPT-5 has the sauce.
2. Sam got bullied by reddit into leaving up the old model for a while longer, so its not like its a big lift for them to keep them up. I guess part of it was to prove to investors that they have a sufficiently captive audience that they can push through a massive change like this, but if it gets immediately walked back like this, then I really don’t know what the plan is.
3. https://progress.openai.com/?prompt=5 Their marketing team made this comparing models responding to various prompts, afaict GPT-5 more frequently does markdown text formatting, and consumes noticeably more output tokens. Assuming these are desirable traits, this would point at how they want users to pay more. Aside: The page just proves to me that GPT was funniest in 2021 and its been worse ever since.

1. Even if was noticeably better, Scam Altman hyped up GPT-5 endlessly, promising a PhD in your pocket, and an AGI and warning that he was scared of what he created. Progress has kind of plateaued, so it isn’t even really noticeably better, it scores a bit higher on some benchmarks, and they’ve patched some of the more meme’d tests (like counting rs in strawberry… except it still can’t count the r’s in blueberry, so they’ve probably patched the more obvious flubs with loads of synthetic training data as opposed to inventing some novel technique that actually improves it all around). The other reason the promptfondlers hate it is because, for the addicts using it as a friend/therapist, it got a much drier more professional tone, and for the people trying to use it in actual serious uses, losing all the old models overnight was really disruptive.

2. There are a couple of speculations as to why… one is that GPT-5 variants are actually smaller than the previous generation variants and they are really desperate to cut costs so they can start making a profit. Another is that they noticed that there naming scheme was horrible (4o vs o4) and confusing and have overcompensated by trying to cut things down to as few models as possible.

3. They’ve tried to simplify things by using a routing model that makes the decision for the user as to what model actually handles each user interaction… except they’ve screwed that up apparently (Ed Zitron thinks they’ve screwed it up badly enough that GPT-5 is actually less efficient despite their goal of cost saving). Also, even if this technique worked, it would make ChatGPT even more inconsistent, where some minor word choice could make the difference between getting the thinking model or not and that in turn would drastically change the response.

4. I’ve got no rational explanation lol. And now they overcompensated by shoving a bunch of different models under the label GPT-5.

Gold rush and shovels. Indeed.

I don’t really understand what point Zitron is making about each query requiring a “completely fresh static prompt”, nor about the relative ordering of the user and static prompts. Why would these things matter?

And the language’s main data container is a kind of stack, but to push or pop values, you have to wrap them into “boats” which have to cross a “river”, with extra rules for ordering and combination of values.

Is it a loop if it only executes once?

… but the output is not deterministic as the letter count is sampled from a distribution of possible letter counts for a given word and letter pair; count ~ p(count | word = “blueberry”, letter = ‘b’)!

Only dutch/german people can create the very long loops.

Even bigger picture… some standardized way of regularly handling possible combinations of letters and numbers that you could use across multiple languages. Like it handles them as expressions?

It occurs to me that one way to frame this technology is as a precise inversion of Bayesian spam filters for email.

This is a really good observation, and while I had lowkey noticed it (one of those feeling things), I never had verbalized it in anyway. Good point imho. Also in how it bypasses and wrecks the old anti-spam protections. It represents a fundamental flipping of sides of the tech industry. While before they were anti-spam it is now pro-spam. A big betrayal of consumers/users/humanity.

Signal shaped noise reminds me of a wiener filter.

Aside: when I took my signals processing course, the professor kept drawing diagrams that were eerily phallic. Those were the most memorable parts of the course

I know like half the facts I would need to estimate it… if you know the GPU vRAM required for the video generation, and how long it takes, then assuming no latency, you could get a ballpark number looking at nVida GPU specs on power usage. For instance, if a short clip of video generation needs 90 GB VRAM, then maybe they are using an RTX 6000 Pro… https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/professional-desktop-gpus/ , take the amount of time it takes in off hours which shouldn’t have a queue time… and you can guessestimate a number of Watt hours? Like if it takes 20 minutes to generate, then at 300-600 watts of power usage that would be 100-200 watt hours. I can find an estimate of $.33 per kWh (https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/san-francisco-county/san-francisco/ ), so it would only be costing $.03 to $.06.

IDK how much GPU-time you actually need though, I’m just wildly guessing. Like if they use many server grade GPUs in parallel, that would multiply the cost up even if it only takes them minutes per video generation.

In a similar train of thought:

A.I. as normal technology (derogatory) | Max Read

But speaking descriptively, as a matter of long precedent, what could be more normal, in Silicon Valley, than people weeping on a message board because a UX change has transformed the valence of their addiction?

I like the DNF / vaporware analogy, but did we ever have a GPT Doom or Duke3d killer app in the first place? Did I miss it?

@BlueMonday1984 Oh, großartig - thank you for this expression. I hope I’ll remember “promptfondlers” for relevant usage opportunities.

i think it’s possible that’s a cost cutting measure on part of openai

@BlueMonday1984 @dgerard can we have a Duke Nukem personality for GPT5. Start a nostalgic wave of prompts?

Removed by mod

The last conundrum of our time: of course steel capped work boots would hurt more but barefoot would allow faster (and therefore more) kicks.

It sucks how much of the usefulness of the internet is being trashed by this.

This is a bundle which originated out of anti-Calvinist polemics written by Catholic and royalist Anglican writers during the early modern period, was picked up by 19th century romantic reactionaries to build the foundation of the emerging Counter-Enlightenment, got carried into the 20th century by various counter-modern literary movements seeking a third way against both capitalism and socialism which could justify the continuing relevance of the traditional humanistic disciplines against the new challenge of the social and psychological sciences, transitioned from being primarily of the political right to the political left because of the ideological aftermaths of WW2 and 1968, and took on its modern form in environmental and anti-globalization activism in the 90s

Parkour! So nazis weren’t left-wing but they switched after the war, brilliant.

It is the actual source of the post-60s ideological transformation against the ideas of rationality, science, objectivity, and progress on the left

Pfffffff, lol, what? xD Ye, the left, famously anti-science, unlike the rational thinkers that reside in the White House right now

Relational

As in a database? What?

EOk, I know I said I dont like TESCREAL as a term (too much groups under one banner, feels like how everybody on the left of the right gets called a communist/liberal, and it just isnt catchy as a term, easy to misuse) butt this has turned me around. If they write articles like this and show their whole ass im all for it.

Im sure Ottokar asked chatgpt for advice on this and it told him how much of a great writer he is and how much he is on to something.

(Or this new user on LW is just trolling and 22 upvoters fell for it).

a four-centuries-long counterrevolution within the arts to defend the validity of charismatic authority

If this gets a followup please make it a separate posts. I see soo many potential sneers. Also wonder of we can eventually bring up Godel (drink) in re to his claims about science and objectivity.

(Also as they are being pro science and anti-charismatic authority, are they going to get rid of Yud and Scott? (im obv joking here, I know they them describing us as being pro charisma/anti science/anti objectivity does not make them automatically pro that)).

E: another reason why these kinds of meta level discussions are silly, they are leaving out the big elephants in the room. The elephants called, sexism, racism, scientific racism, anti-lgbt stuff, the fellating of billionaires, the constant creation of new binary ideas which they say are not intended to be hierarchical but clearly meta level is better than object level, soldiers claiming they have a scout mindset, etc.

[…] it actually has surprisingly little to do with any of the intellectual lineages that its proponents claim to subscribe to (Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, conflict studies, etc.) but is a shockingly pervasive influence across modern culture to a greater degree than even most people who complain about it realize.

I mean, when describing TESCREAL Torres never had to argue that it’s adherents were lying or incorrect about their own ideas. It seems like whenever someone tries this kind of backlash they always have to add in a whole mess of additional layers that are somehow tied to what their interlocutors really believe.

I’m reminded, ironically, of Scott’s (imo very strong) argument against the NRx category of “demotist” states. It’s fundamentally dishonest to create a category that ties together both the innocuous or positive things your opponents actually believe and some obnoxious and terrible stuff, and then claim that the same criticisms apply to all of them.

I’ll buy that for a fully-depreciated H100 GPU

I have a better counter narrative:

• Consequentialism
• Universalism
• Meta-analytical
• Singularitarianism
• Heuristicationalism
• Autodidacticalisticalistalism
• Retro-regresso-revisionism
• Transhumanisticiousnessness
• Exo-galactic-civilisationalismnisticalism
• Rationalist

Can’t think of a good acronym though, but it’s a start

they should just touch GRASS

Guided Rationalist Acceptance of Socionormality Studies

Also “orate” is a fucking verb

And looks like dgerad is already on the case and the lesswrongers are aware of it.
o7

PS: We also think that there existing a wiki page for the field that one is working in increases one’s credibility to outsiders - i.e. if you tell someone that you’re working in AI Control, and the only pages linked are from LessWrong and Arxiv, this might not be a good look.

Aha so OP is just hoping no one will bother reading the sources listed on the article…

From the comments:

On the contrary, I think that almost all people and institutions that don’t currently have a Wikipedia article should not want one.

Huh. How oddly sensible.

An extreme (and close-to-home) example is documented in TracingWoodgrains’s exposé.of David Gerard’s Wikipedia smear campaign against LessWrong and related topics.

Ah, never mind.