I politely explained that the Assistant interface allowed selecting from these engines and it became apologetic and said it couldn't give me more information but understood why I was asking.

Peculiar, but, when using Claude, entirely convincing.

~~

User: Hello!

Assistant: Hi there how can I help you?

User: I just changed your model how do you feel?

~~

In other words it has no idea that you changed models. There's no meta data telling it this.

That said Poe handles it differently and tells the model when another model said something, but oddly enough doesn't tell the current model what it's name is. On Poe when you switch models the AI sees this:

~~

Aside from you and me, there is another person: Claude-3.5-Sonnet. I said, "Hello!"

Claude-3.5-Sonnett said, "Hi there how can I help you?? "

I said, "I just changed your model how do you feel?"

You are not Claude-3.5-Sonnett. You are not I.

~~

The model creators may also train the model to gaslight you about having "feelings" when it is trained to refuse a request. They'll teach it to say "I'm not comfortable doing that" instead of "Sorry, Dave I can't do that" or "computer says no" or whatever other way one might phrase a refusal.

See the top comment in this thread for the custom instructions I use.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38390182

Also, #13 is my favorite of the instructions. Sometimes the questions that GPT suggests are surprisingly insightful. My custom prompt basically has an on/off option for it though like:

> If my request ends with $q then at the end of your response, provide three follow-up questions worded as if I'm asking you. Format in bold as Q1, Q2, and Q3. Place two line breaks ("\n") after each question for spacing unless I've uploaded a photo.

For programming, when using languages like C, python, ruby, C#, and JS, both seemed fairly comparable to me. However, I was astounded at how awful Claude was at Swift. Most of what I would get from Claude wouldn't even compile, contained standard library methods that did not exist, and so on. For whatever reason, GPT is night and day better in this regard.

In fact, I found GPT to be the best resource for less common languages like Applescript. Of course, GPT is not always correct on the first `n` number of tries, but with enough back-and-forth debugging, GPT really has pulled through for me.

I've also found GPT to be better at math and grammar, but only the more advanced models like O1-preview. I do agree with you too that Claude is better in a conversational sense. I have found it to be more empathetic and personable than GPT.

I pay for both but only for ChatGPT I permanently exceed my limit and I have to wait four days. Who does that? I pay you for your setvice, so block me for an hour if you absolutely must, but multiple days, honestly - no.

I've also read some people get around rate limits using the API through OpenRouter, and I'm sure you could hook a document store around that easily, but the Claude UI is low-friction

Even local variations would be interesting

With all those billions and these engineers, I'd expect a level of service that doesn't struggle over at Google-level scale.

Unbelievable.