I don't at all blame OpenAI for going down this path (indeed, I laud them for making expensive bets), but I do blame all the quote-un-quote "thought leaders" who were writing breathless posts about how AGI was just around the corner because things would just scale linearly forever. It was classic "based on historical data, this 10 year old will be 20 feet tall by the time he's 30" thinking, and lots of people called them out on this, and they either just ignored it or responded with "oh, simple not-in-the-know peons" dismissiveness.
To your point, though, I would add not only who has seen any grand conspiracy actually be accomplished, who has seen one even attempted and kept under wraps? Such that the absence of corroborating sources was more consistent with an effectively executed conspiracy theory than the simple absence of such a plan.
Of course, that's my point. Again, I think it's great that OpenAI swung for the fences. My beef is again with these "thought leaders" who would write this blather about AGI being just around the corner in the most uncritical manner possible (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40576324). These folks tended to be in one of two buckets:
1. "AGI cultists" as I called them, the "we're entering a new phase of human evolution"-type people.
2. People who had a motive to try and sell something.
And it's not about one side or the other being "right" or "wrong" after the fact, it's that so much of this just sounded like magical thinking and unwarranted extrapolations from the get go. The actual experts in the area, if they were free to be honest, were much, much more cautious in their pronouncements.
Either way, AGI or not, LLMs are pretty magical.
And yeah, LLMs are awesome. But you can't predict scientific discovery, and all future AI capabilities are literally still a research project.
I've had this on my HN user page since 2017, and it's just as true as ever: In the real world, exponentials are actually early stage sigmoids, or even gaussians.
I ask chatgpt to give me a map highlighting all spanish speaking countries, gives me stable diffusion trash.
Just gotta do the grunt work, add a tool with a map api. Integrate with google maps for transit stuff.
It's a good LLM model already it doesn't need to be einstein and solve aerospatial equations. We just need to wait until they realize their limits and find the humility to build yet another useful product that won't conquer the world.
Works great when the output is small enough to unit test or immediately try in situations with no possible negative outcomes.
Anything larger? Skip the LLM slop and go to the source. You have to go to the source, anyway.
Yeah, and then check that. I don't get this argument at all.
People who uncritically swallow the first answer or two they get from Google have a name... but that would just derail the thread into politics.
It turns out that going from not knowing what you don't know to knowing what you don't know adds an order of magnitude improvement to people's experience.
Are you referring to the search tool? Like when you ask the LLM something beyond its cutoff date it searches and gives you what it searched?
While it's cool that that feature shows the sources, the core of the LLM still does not provide sources, again by design it forgets what the sources are, it cannot link to the common crawl datapoints.
4o can link to sources to some extent, but it sounds like it doesn't do "research-y" things at all unless you have a paid account. It works for me -- note how it cites the manufacturer's literature here: https://i.imgur.com/lRkH948.png -- but when I ask it the same thing in a private window it doesn't cite any sources: https://i.imgur.com/Kc6Y0IR.png .
So that does seem kind of lame. They will offer source citations in the free model the minute they realize they can deliver ads that way, I'm sure...
For example, have you ever personally verified that humans went to the moon? Have you ever done the experiments to prove the Earth is round?
For example, if I'm looking for some medical finding and I get to a source that's a clinical study from a reputable publication, I may be satisfied and stop there since this is not my area of expertise. However, a person with knowledge of the field may be able to parse the study and pick it apart better than I could. Hence, their search would not end there since they would be unsatisfied with just the source I was satisfied with.
On the other hand, having no verifiable sources should leave everyone unsatisfied.
I have, actually! Thanks, astronomy class!
I've even estimated the earth's diameter, and I was only like 30% off (iirc). Pretty good for the simplistic method and rough measurements we used.
Sometimes authorities are actually authoritative, though, particularly for technical, factual material. If I'm reading a published release date for a video game, directly from the publisher -- what is there to contest? Meanwhile, ask an LLM and you may have... mixed results, even if the date is within its knowledge cutoff.
Was it the stick on the earth and measuring the right triangle casted by the shadow?
IIRC you also had to do the same thing on another spot far apart and measure the difference between both triangles. At the same time.
I specifically remember that we measured how far the shadow moved over time using chalk. I think this was in lieu of having a second triangle somewhere else, although, for all I know we might have used a second reference distance.
Our campus had this elaborate outdoor "observatory" that had all sorts of interesting features. The gnomon was one of them, but there were other cool things, like IIRC there was a metal sculpture where Polaris would be seen through a central hole (and a guide inscribed in the concrete to figure out where to stand for that to happen -- I think it was based on viewing height).
However they’ll need to replace vast swathes of the economy to justify these AI companies’ market caps.
I'm getting this. https://claude.ai/share/7a8ecdb0-a28c-4d48-ad81-2d9e95fab538
This is kind of the crux though. The only way to make LLMs more useful is to basically make them traditional AI. So it's not really a leap forward nevermind path to AGI.
And unfortunately one not exclusive to OpenAI. Anthropic credits also expire after 1 year.
More info from ChatGPT here: https://chatgpt.com/share/67c5ad36-2f84-8001-a61f-11d4e17135...
Disclaimer: have not tried 4.5 yet, just skimmed through the announcement, using 4o regularly.
As for API price, when it matters businesses and people are willing to pay much more for just a bit better results. OpenAI doesn't take the other options away. So we don't lose anything.
The leap from GPT-4o to 4.5 isn't a leap—it's an expensive tiptoe toward incremental improvements, priced like a luxury item without the luxury payoff.
With pricing at 15x GPT-4o, they're practically daring us not to use it. Given this, I wouldn't be surprised if GPT-4.5 quietly disappears from the API once OpenAI finishes squeezing insights (and cash) out of this experiment.