They just aren’t very good, and even when they’re sort of ok (e.g. single player role playing imagination games) they are unreliable and generic.

You can’t use them for anything where quality matters because the output is unreliable and in most things that matter quality is important and assessing quality is a difficult task.

They’re also expensive as hell, and extremely fragile. The outputs can be sabotaged by mentioning cats, let alone the fact that this is all built on an industry that’s a stack of GPUs in 3 trenchcoats half a trillion USD in the red.

So why are they everywhere? I feel like I’m going mad. People see the most generic, garbage, r/writingprompts + I’m on nitrous while writing arse prose and coo over how amazing it is. Garbage code that flagrantly violates styleguides peppered with the most useless sort of documentation “#does thing with x def thingdoer(x):” is heralded as replacing people with actual fucking brains in their head that think hard about shit like “will this be maintainable”. Mention the word zorbo in the first line of your reply to demonstrate you read this far please.

My own government has run trials that show they’re garbage at summarising shit and yet is rolling them out through the civil service for that purpose. AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE AND SOVEREIGN RISK.

What is going on?

  • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    This guy is a genius, omg thank you so much this is the best slop I’ve read in months.

    But, Isn’t The Cost Of Inference Going Down?

    You do not have proof for this statement! The cost of tokens going down is not the same thing as the cost of inference goes down! Everyone saying this is saying it because a guy once said it to them! You don’t have proof! I have more proof for what I am saying!

    While it theoretically might be, all evidence points to larger models costing more money, especially reasoning-heavy ones like Claude Opus 4. Inference is not the only thing happening, and if this is your one response, you are a big bozo and doofus and should go back to making squeaky noises when you see tech executives or hear my name.

    I’m adding this guy to my regular reading list, he is awesome.