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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Is it so over for OpenAI? I just signed up for a Grok subscription for $7/month. Apparently the reasoning performance of their new model is on the same tier as ChatGPT-4o and Claude Sonnet. Image generation is best-in-class (using Flux). And of course it's much less neutered than the competition.

The miracles that OpenAI accomplished in the last 3 years now seem rather... commonplace. There's a lot of competitors at nearly the same level. Facebook's open-sourced AI, Llama 3.1, will commoditize the space. While it's not really feasible to run these models on your home computer (yet) it will be easy for smaller companies to buy compute and then sell Chat-GPT similar services. It will be a race to the bottom now.

OpenAI is running at a gigantic loss. I'm sure they were planning to capture a monopoly and then raise prices. That seems less likely to work now as their product is undifferentiated.

And the irony of Elon controlling a Chat-GPT similar is just too delicious. OpenAI management stole the IP of the non-profit for their own financial gain. Now open source is routing around the damage and rebuilding it all from scratch. I bet Grok's total development costs are like 1% of OpenAI's.

Are there any other industries that AI has really had an effect on aside from coding and graphic design? Search maybe?

I use it daily for these tasks and I think most people like me do, but are there other industries like this?

I would guess that many translation companies that previously used boutique translation models are now just using "common" LLMs, which has constituted yet another step in machine translation improving. Still a lot of translate-from-scratch work sent to me, though.

If we can get you to post quarterly reports on the state of the translation job market, that would be great. You're my personal barometer for when I should start taking AI seriously. My personal experience matches yours so far, and the idea that AI is some sort of a revolution in my field (software dev) is bizarre to me. So far it didn't deliver on anything more than a slightly better autocomplete. Some people use it as a replacement for Stack Overflow, which I still prefer to look up directly.

So far it didn't deliver on anything more than a slightly better autocomplete.

It is far better at that - for experienced developers doing something in area new to them

Some people use it as a replacement for Stack Overflow, which I still prefer to look up directly.

Often it is a superior replacement: you can get intern-quality work on any topic you want, very specific for your task. That sometimes is better than SO. And so far, on track of getting better and better.

I heard all that, tried it out for myself, and it just doesn't feel all that great to me. Maybe one day it will get better but it's just not all that useful in day to day tasks (which your own description kind of confirms).

you can get intern-quality work on any topic you want

That's terrible. I always seen internships essentially as charity work companies engage in to polish their PR, or, at best,extend their recruitment pool. You make it sound like the sale's pitch for Tesla's "full self driving (supervised)". It's awesome. Can take you anywhere. Almost no interventions... which results in you having to be ready to intervene at all times, or die driving into a truck.

Maybe one day it will get better, but I'd rather rely on Stefferi as my canary, than on the words of AI enthusiasts.

it's just not all that useful in day to day tasks

I guess it depends on how often you need to do stuff like "now I need to drop into badly written docs of a new setup and get simple program working".

I need it fairly often but I can imagine someone who needs it approximately never.

And I am quite surprised that it is useful even for that.

than on the words of AI enthusiasts

I am not an AI enthusiast