[Yusefmosiah]

OpenAI’s strategy has been bizarre since at least last November, when they launched custom GPTs, then had the boardroom coup.

Since the launch of Claude 3 Opus, and then Claude 3.5 Sonnet, they have been significantly behind Anthropic in terms of the general intelligence of their models. And instead of deploying something on par or better, they are making demos of video generation (Sora) or audio-to-audio models, not releasing anything.

GPT-4o is quite bad at coding, often getting stuck in a loop, and “fixing” buggy code by rewriting it without any changes.

GPT-4o is speculated to be a distillation of a larger model, and now GPT-4o-mini is an even dumber smaller model. But what’s the point?

Who is actually using small/fast/cheap/dumb models in production apps? Most real apps require higher reliability than even the biggest/slowest/priciest/smartest models can provide today. For the use case of transformers that has taken off, aiding students and knowledge workers in one-off tasks like writing code and prose, most users want smarter, more reliable outputs, even at the expense of speed and cost.

GPT-4o-mini seems like a move to increase margins, not make customers happier. That, like demoing products without launching them, is what big old slow corporations do, not how world-leading startups operate.

[sunaookami]

Since Claude 3.5 Sonnet was released I can't go back to GPT anymore. It sounds too "robotic" and is overly verbose. It explains every little detail that I don't want to know and still is far worse than Claude. OpenAI has to really step up their game if they don't want to fall behind. In fact, GPT-4 got worse back in November, the best version is still the one from June 2023 but it's only available in the API.

[jmccarthy]

Sonnet is great, but also suggest exploiting custom instructions in the ChatGPT UI. Here's a snippet from mine:

Extremely concise, formal. As short as possible. Assume I am an industry expert in any topic we discuss. Answer assuming I have the highest level of intellect possible, and do not require explication regardless of the sophistication of the topic. In cases where one approach among many is superior, offer an opinionated argument in favor of that approach.