Comment by tshaddox

2 days ago

If you conceptualize this as “there is an appropriate amount of brevity for each situation” then it would be expected for a better model to use different amounts of brevity if it gets better at determining the appropriate amount.

My view is that popular models by default output wildly excessive amounts of prose for nearly every use case, so if this changes in a new model that’s a pure win.

> wildly excessive amounts of prose

Not just prose. I think this is part of the reason why you see ridiculous code with insane error handling and type checking even for impossible cases.

  • This is one reason I switched back to Claude after testing various alternatives a few months ago. Claude ended up writing much more elegant code.

    Although I was surprised that I could get very Claude like results from Chinese models though by just telling it to make the code elegant.

    Reminds me of the old days with art AI where you had to put "+good -bad" in the prompt because otherwise it would assume you just wanted random quality outputs, because it had been trained on random quality inputs...

The models don't get better, except when a new one is released. Their performance depends solely on the model training before release and how well you curate the context you feed it. That's it. Contrary to popular belief these things are not intelligent.

  • >The models don't get better, except when a new one is released. Their performance depends solely on the model training before release and how well you curate the context you feed it. That's it.

    Not quite. The hosting side can change reasoning budgets (or re-assign what terms like "high" means), temperature and other decoding parameters, output length limits, finetune internal "hidden" prompt, latency optimizations, finetune attention algorithms, even change quantization - all still serving as the same model.

    We know (or suspect) Anthropic frequently nerfs models while keeping their name and version the same.

    • Right. They can do all those things. And none of that will make it smart or able to learn new things. The underlying model is just an llm. But judging from the downvotes, it seems AI folks get upset when someone talks honestly about their precious piles of matrix multiplication.

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  • >The models don't get better, except when a new one is released.

    My brother in Christ this entire thread is talking about the new model that was released

    • It was edited. Original talked about the model learning. Glad they managed to clarify. Because the models are quite literally stupid.

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