Speaker 1: Also media hell, and welcome to this week's better Offline Monologue.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, led Zeitron, and this has been a
Speaker 1: tough week. I'm not gonna lie. Monday, we recorded a
Speaker 1: wonderful episode with Victoria's song and Ashmun Rodriguez, which got
Speaker 1: lost due to a technical four. And then I recorded
Speaker 1: this in time monolog, which then got lost to a
Speaker 1: completely different different computer, different room, different place, technical error.
Speaker 1: I love making this show for all of you. It's
Speaker 1: been kind of a pisser, but it's important we get
Speaker 1: on top of this goddamn subject. So check the episode notes,
Speaker 1: buy a challenge coin, read the newsletter. A's a premium
Speaker 1: version unrelated to this show. I'd love if you'd subscribe,
Speaker 1: and if you don't, I won't feel anything. Don't worry
Speaker 1: about it, but let's get to it. Last week open
Speaker 1: Ai launched GPT five, a new flagship model of some
Speaker 1: sort that's allegedly better at coding and writing, but in
Speaker 1: reality is much more of the same. Another model is
Speaker 1: interterminately better at benchmarks built specifically for large language moddles,
Speaker 1: because they can't do actual work. The Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: reported late last year that it took multiple half billion
Speaker 1: dollar training runs to get GPT five off the ground,
Speaker 1: and Altman him said said in the podcast with theovon
Speaker 1: of all people at GPT five scared him and made
Speaker 1: him say, what have we done? And that's a good
Speaker 1: bloody question, Sammy. According to open Ai, GPT five is
Speaker 1: a unified system with a smart, efficient model that answers
Speaker 1: most questions, a deeper reasoning model, and a real time
Speaker 1: router that quickly decides which model to use based on
Speaker 1: conversation type, complexity, tool needs. And you're explicit in tent.
Speaker 1: I read all of that out because I wanted you
Speaker 1: to hear how convoluted GPT five is and how much
Speaker 1: effort open Ai has had to put in to create
Speaker 1: something that, based on all reports is fine. To quote
Speaker 1: Simon Willison, it just does stuff. Wowie zowie. In simpler terms,
Speaker 1: Chad GPT's version of GPT five takes the user's prompt
Speaker 1: and decides which modele to use as a result, using
Speaker 1: one of a few submodels GPT five Regular, Mini or
Speaker 1: now I know, and then spits out an output. And
Speaker 1: there are rate limits, by the way, so if you
Speaker 1: use it too much you get kicked down to many automatically.
Speaker 1: If you ask it to think about something, it will
Speaker 1: choose to engage the reasoning part of the model. These
Speaker 1: things do not think, by the way. They are probabilistic models,
Speaker 1: so reasoning is kind of like you get a prompt
Speaker 1: and then it reads the prompt with another model and says, Okay,
Speaker 1: what would the steps be to execute this? It has
Speaker 1: some returns, but recent papers suggest that it doesn't work
Speaker 1: that well anyway. Using this, you mostly have to trust
Speaker 1: the open ai will choose the best model for the job,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the cheapest one for open ai to serve,
Speaker 1: which is what I think they're actually doing. As part
Speaker 1: of the launch, open ai has also killed access to
Speaker 1: all other models that at least is planning to, and
Speaker 1: truncated user access to two choices GPT five or GPT
Speaker 1: five thinking with legacy models like four four many and
Speaker 1: their associated rate limits gone immediately for most, though some
Speaker 1: of them are back, and in sixty days of people
Speaker 1: paying two hundred dollars a month, you'll work out why
Speaker 1: I'm dithering in a second. This enraged the chat gp subreddit,
Speaker 1: with users claiming that GPT five was and I quote,
Speaker 1: wearing the skin of their dead friend, referring to GPT
Speaker 1: four oh, and another saying that GPT four point five
Speaker 1: genuinely talk to them and as pathetic as it sounds,
Speaker 1: was their only friend. And it must be clear, we
Speaker 1: can make fun of these people if we want, but
Speaker 1: this is actually genuinely sad. There is something going on
Speaker 1: here where people are so lonely that they want to
Speaker 1: talk to a chat bot. Mock them if you want,
Speaker 1: and some of you will, and I don't know if
Speaker 1: I even want to. But something is happening here and
Speaker 1: it isn't brilliant. But after a few days, Clammy Samuel
Speaker 1: and restored access to GPT four overpaid users, and then
Speaker 1: this only matched the stem the type briefly, with one
Speaker 1: user saying that their baby was back, that they cried
Speaker 1: a lot, and that they were crying as they wrote
Speaker 1: the post, ending by saying love you. I assumed to
Speaker 1: GPT four zero. Here's the problem. Though, users are now
Speaker 1: doubting that the four O that open Ai is restored
Speaker 1: is actually the same model. One post claims that four
Speaker 1: roh has lost its soul, and another says that fourro
Speaker 1: is lobotomized all the way down in one three. One
Speaker 1: user said that four row had gotten markedly worse suddenly,
Speaker 1: and another said it's definitely not the same, though others
Speaker 1: in the thread claimed that it was. Another post said
Speaker 1: legacy GPT four row is GPT five in cosplay, even
Speaker 1: as others pleaded with them and said it was exactly
Speaker 1: the same and that people were experiencing some strange phantom
Speaker 1: love for placebo effect. And I think that's actually what's
Speaker 1: going on, writ large. Chat GPT was never a success
Speaker 1: based on its actual abilities or outputs or things it
Speaker 1: could do, but a global marketing campaign perpetuated by it
Speaker 1: taking business media asleep at the wheel, or worse still,
Speaker 1: that wanted these companies to win and help them by lying.
Speaker 1: I have done a comprehensive evaluation of the last three
Speaker 1: years of press around chat, GPT and GPT itself, and
Speaker 1: you will look in the things in twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: and there's shit that's just fucking made up. There's a
Speaker 1: whole go and look up task Grabbit GPT four. There
Speaker 1: are so many I'm a link one in the fucking notes.
Speaker 1: There are people that claim that GPT four ordered a
Speaker 1: task grab it to complete a capture. Now, on top
Speaker 1: of this not being a thing that task grabbit generally
Speaker 1: it does. This is from the system card of GPT
Speaker 1: four and it claims that it hired a taskrab, except
Speaker 1: when you look at just said it messaged them. It's
Speaker 1: very clearly made up. But everyone reported it as agents
Speaker 1: existing in twenty twenty three. Aha. Every time I read
Speaker 1: this stuff, I feel little goddamn insane. But anyway, because
Speaker 1: these models do not have obvious replicable ways outside of
Speaker 1: benchmarks of testing what they can do, each user is
Speaker 1: effectively in a constant vibe check with the models, and
Speaker 1: the sycophantic qualities of GPT four oh were clearly enough
Speaker 1: to endear them to the platform. People using GPT four Oh,
Speaker 1: they couldn't tell you why it's different to GPT five
Speaker 1: other than it feels less human or doesn't do the
Speaker 1: same things, even if those things are kind of hard
Speaker 1: to define. This is what happens when you build a
Speaker 1: following for a product based on specious hype and vague
Speaker 1: promises and lines of inference, of course, and then allow
Speaker 1: users to make up the reasons that they care. You
Speaker 1: begin engaging with the gamer mindset of vibes based fandom
Speaker 1: that's completely unbreakable unless you make one subtle change that
Speaker 1: you could never see coming that breaks the illusion, leading
Speaker 1: to gamer like distrust and anger. You see, I theorized
Speaker 1: that the vast majority of chat GPT users do not
Speaker 1: know where they used it in the first place. Three
Speaker 1: years of immediate pressure to use AI that AI was
Speaker 1: the future, their boss is saying AI is important and
Speaker 1: that you would be left behind if you didn't use AI.
Speaker 1: Mean that people come to chat GPT to work out
Speaker 1: why they're using it in the first place, which has
Speaker 1: led to all sorts of bizarre emotional attachments, kind of
Speaker 1: like one's attachments to a live service game and shout
Speaker 1: out to Catharsis twenty three on Blue Sky, who made
Speaker 1: this observation. As a result, users were incredibly sensitive to
Speaker 1: changes like removing or changing a model because their association
Speaker 1: with chat GPT was based on However, GPT four zero
Speaker 1: works and sounds by ripping it out and replacing it
Speaker 1: with GPT five, users immediately felt jilted and swindled by
Speaker 1: open AI, and much like a dying live service game,
Speaker 1: any changes that have been made as a result were
Speaker 1: met with paranoia and confusion. Clamiel Altman's attempts to paper
Speaker 1: over the problem by boosting rate limits on GPT five's
Speaker 1: thinking and restoring access to GPT four to ZH and
Speaker 1: other models for pay maid users were not enough because,
Speaker 1: in a very real sense, many of those users could
Speaker 1: not tell you what they liked four to oh to
Speaker 1: begin with four oh wasn't good so much as it
Speaker 1: was an investment of time. By showing that open ai
Speaker 1: is willing to cut things arbitrarily, users can no longer
Speaker 1: trust that this investment of time is worthy, especially as
Speaker 1: many complain that it launch GPD five deleted a bunch
Speaker 1: of conversations. Now open ai sits in an odd spot
Speaker 1: where they're supposedly huge Manhattan Project level launch has been
Speaker 1: met with either apathy or agony. While they've plicated users
Speaker 1: in the short term, it's very clear that the vast
Speaker 1: majority of users this, like GPT five and power users,
Speaker 1: don't seem particularly impressed with it either. This was meant
Speaker 1: to be the big launch that changed things for open
Speaker 1: ai forever, but it's turned into something of a mass
Speaker 1: betrayal or just kind of a mass letdown. And because
Speaker 1: it's based on vibes rather than its actual ability to
Speaker 1: do something, there's very little one could do to fix
Speaker 1: this problem. It's unclear how all of this affects the
Speaker 1: company long term, but things do not seem good. Sam
Speaker 1: Wortman has already said that open ai is having to
Speaker 1: reallocate capacity for the couple of months prioritizing paying Chat
Speaker 1: GPT users of an API demand up from the current
Speaker 1: allocated capacity and commitments that they've made to their customers
Speaker 1: code for those who do not want to pay priority processing,
Speaker 1: which is now available for any developer. It's also unclear
Speaker 1: what happens next. GPT five is not the future. Open
Speaker 1: ai is running out of capacity, and their product, despite
Speaker 1: the fanfare, has no capabilities or reasons to adopt it
Speaker 1: that are really new or interesting. Years of allowing the
Speaker 1: media to spin out ridiculous narratives about what AI can
Speaker 1: or could do using vague pablem that kind of suggests
Speaker 1: they're more powerful than they are has created a pr
Speaker 1: campaign for a product that does not exist, and the
Speaker 1: seven hundred million weekly active users of chat GPT have
Speaker 1: clearly arrived there without much guidance. The attachment born of
Speaker 1: compulsion and societal pressure rather than any real use cases.
Speaker 1: When you allow people to define an indeterminately powerful tool
Speaker 1: by any standard they like, with no interest in correcting them,
Speaker 1: with no interest in guiding them, with no interest in
Speaker 1: actually showing them what it was that they were paying
Speaker 1: for others. Then it can generate staff, You'll create an
Speaker 1: attachment to it that devis any real ability you have
Speaker 1: to control things. Open ai was never forced to productize
Speaker 1: and at scale. It's a very real possibility that people
Speaker 1: have pressure by the media and society itself force themselves
Speaker 1: to find meaning in LMS somehow, even if it feels
Speaker 1: kind of stupid. And what I mean by this is
Speaker 1: you get to the product and there really isn't that
Speaker 1: much guidance. Go on an open AI's website and have
Speaker 1: a look at the chat GPT page and look at
Speaker 1: what it tells you to do. It's quite vague. You
Speaker 1: can look at it can analyze data, right, it can
Speaker 1: generate stuff. It helps you do ideas. Is that good?
Speaker 1: Am I smart for using this? Everything else you look
Speaker 1: at in the software world will tell you what it
Speaker 1: is you're using it for any consumer driven software at
Speaker 1: the very least. Yeah, chat GPT's never had to because
Speaker 1: the media for three years or two years, I guess
Speaker 1: with chat GPT has kind of just sat there doing
Speaker 1: the work for them, telling them, oh, yeah, you can
Speaker 1: use it as a powerful person a system assistant. How
Speaker 1: to assist me with what? Nasty? Kevin Russe creepy Kevin
Speaker 1: in the New York Times a few weeks ago, when
Speaker 1: he did Everyone's Using AI piece with Casey Newton, he
Speaker 1: said that it's a powerful assistant. It's like, for what
Speaker 1: you can't do that? This shit can't control my calendar.
Speaker 1: I don't want to touch in my emails. I don't
Speaker 1: think most people do either. So you've just got people
Speaker 1: to use it as a shit, our search engine, an
Speaker 1: online companion, and a brainstorming thing, which is a natural
Speaker 1: way to get people kind of addicted, but addicted to
Speaker 1: a product you don't truly control and a product you
Speaker 1: don't truly understand, one that can be swiped by just
Speaker 1: about anyone. I actually think we're on the the kind
Speaker 1: of downward spiral for this shit. I am winking like
Speaker 1: a pig and squawking like a bird watching this happen.
Speaker 1: Even core Weavers crashing as I record this. They're down
Speaker 1: seventeen point nine one percent. Still up too much, though,
Speaker 1: And I really do think something has shifted thanks to
Speaker 1: GPT five, I'm a excited and like Doctor Stones once said,
Speaker 1: get excited because I think the next few months, like
Speaker 1: next year, is going to be chuckle heavy's. We're going
Speaker 1: to be whimsy pilled as we go through the remainder
Speaker 1: of the AI Boom, and I'll be here to guide
Speaker 1: you through it. Thanks for listening.