Comment by talon8635

See Shepard tone. Similarly model releases could be engineered to appear that they’re always getting better by slowly degrading and upgrading at the right time. That plus hitting some benchmarks and making a lot of noise around that.

> might they all pursue this kind of deception

They might but multiple competitors engaging in ongoing deception as an intentional corporate strategy isn't required to explain what we're seeing. It's entirely possible to get the same clearly unethical outcome without any employees knowingly participating in an explicitly unethical plan of record.

Instead it happens without overt coordination when individuals and groups within an org each pursue their local metrics and incentives. In isolation, no individual action seems obviously unethical on its own. They just look like 'optimizing performance', 'maintaining ASP or ARPU targets' or 'achieving operating margin', etc. Customers are still getting deceived and receiving less for their money than they think. The difference is most of the people involved in enabling it get to not feel bad about themselves.

Kinda. Off the top of my head, DeepSeek and their thinking model was pretty new and interesting. Multi input models are also newish (combined input of text, image, video, audio, etc). Then there's Jev, a recently release that has a lot of people talking. It isn't really an LLM, but also is one.

Sam Altman believes he can train a model entirely on synthetic data, which he admits would not have human world knowledge but is interesting none the less, which likely led to their mathematical models.

Overall models have become cheaper to run and smarter per token.