Comment by kragen
9 hours ago
If Opus 5.5 is 500x better than Deepseek, but Deepseek can solve all your problems, maybe you need to work on better problems. If you don't, and you're in business, your competitors will work on the better problems. If you're an employee, your employer might prefer to pay Anthropic instead of you. If you're doing projects you're interested in, you can tackle more ambitious projects with a more capable model.
This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5. Well, mostly. It doesn't implement task switching yet; we'll see if it runs into a wall at some point. But it boots in QEMU, and it's running a user process in ring 3 and serving web pages.
> maybe you need to work on better problems
I have enough real problems in life. I don't need to invent new ones just because a new technology is available.
Many of my problems in life are fully solved far past my satiation point by a 3b model that costs me nothing to run.
Many others are not.
But in either case, when I am acting and living wisely, almost all of my problems exist prior to the existence of technological solutions to those problems.
This is also true for the customers and employers that I care to work with. This has changed in me over time, but I now try my best to avoid inventing new problems. The world has enough big, important problems already.
> This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5.
This is cool but also a good example. I don't need a personalized microkernel just because it's possible to have one.
Maybe I need one and I don't know it, but the problem statement definitely isn't "I have inherent desire for a personalized microkernel".
You've misunderstood what I was talking about; that's a different meaning of the word "problem". Possibly you did not intend to start a merely semantic argument, but that's what you ended up doing, so I am unfortunately going to have to point at the dictionary.
You're talking about definition 1 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/problem, "A difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with," with the examples given being racism, addictions, and lack of access to health care. Those aren't the kind of problems AI can help with.
The kind of "problem" that AI can help with is definition 2, "A question to be answered, schoolwork exercise." That is the character of engineering "problems", although they are more open-ended than schoolwork exercises, because there are many defensible tradeoffs. "How can I build a bridge here?" or "How can I improve the fuel efficiency of this vehicle?" is a "problem" in the sense of a question to be answered, not in the sense of being similar to racism or addiction.
If the questions you're thinking of are so easy to answer that they can be easily answered by a hypothetical AI model 1/500th as good as Opus 5.5 — well, think harder.
The best problems to work on are not necessarily the hardest ones, nor the ones that need the most intelligence. They're the problems you, or other people, actually have. Are you going to give up on painting your deck because it's too easy and you don't need a 500x genius to do it?
Yeah no, if you elicit Opus 5.5 , anyone else can, and you have no moat either.
But if on the other hand, I mostly use my human intelligence and just need a dumb model to complement my human intelligence at low cost and high speed (say review every commit to catch obvious bugs), I have a much better chance of building an actual moat than you do.
But outside of coding, it’s even more clear that you don’t need frontier intelligence. My customer service agent is very happy with a 100B param Deepseek flash model, thank you!
Yes, obviously a microkernel operating system that you can vibecode in a morning is not a salable product. But it's still a perfectly good operating system, and sometimes people need those, and they're a huge pain in the ass to write, especially to debug. But sometimes off-the-shelf OSes aren't good enough. Something like 50% of the embedded operating system market is still "Other/Custom".
> say review every commit to catch obvious bugs
I’m using subscription models for exactly that, better models catch more subtle bugs, and they catch them faster. It works out far better in terms of work-hours saved.
Also A/ then OAI slashed token pricing by 2x~5x on their latest models