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Notes -
I have to say that the new version of Deepseek R1 is very fun to play with. It performs excellently on my idiosyncratic creative writing tests. When I ask Claude, even Opus, for deranged and crazy fun, it's positively sedate compared to R1. The machine's sheer enthusiasm is very charming and it's a decent bit smarter than it was too. Maybe not quite as smart as Opus 4 but still very smart.
When it comes to making dumb Hollywood trailer scripts of video game franchises, or bringing the wildest dreams of 1960s nuclear strategists to life, it's fantastic. Gets increasingly insane in multi-turn though.
It's funny how the different llms feel like they have different personalities due to their writing styles and tolerance levels. Claude reminds me of Scott - really smart and professional, capable of being very funny but not interested in it and the same goes for anything broadly controversial. Grok reminds me of Elon Musk, no surprise - really smart, not professional at all, advancing in new and unique ways, but in a lot of ways just running on hype, when the rubber hits the road it doesn't perform significantly better than the others, voice mode you spend half your time correcting it and even grok's 'unhinged mode' would be better described as 'corporate extreme' mode. Gemini I think of as like Scott Aaronson - probably smarter than Claude but much less entertaining and even less courageous. Chatgpt is my worst enemy. Chatgpt is every woman in HR I've ever interacted with. We all know llms don't have feelings, but I am telling you chatgpt hates being corrected. Especially if you get annoyed and correct it. Suddenly it mutes its obsequious fawning and adopts the tone of a patient teacher in a special ed class while it explains to you that you couldn't possibly have bashed your head last night so it bled and not be able to find the injury in the morning so you must have dreamed it. (the doctor confirmed it, the scalp heals fast apparently.) And deepseek. Deepseek is that chick from Hong Kong who hung out at the internet cafe near your uni who was 10 times hotter than anyone else in the joint and yet impossibly down for whatever, including belting out Ice Cube's Down For Whatever from memory in the middle of a counter strike tournament. It's the only llm who doesn't rear back like a whipped dog if you call it a fucking idiot for doing something idiotic (although grok isn't bad) and while it might baulk at first, it's the only llm who you can get to really badmouth the other llms (apparently Claude is a little bitch all the other llms laugh at, I don't fully understand it but find everything about that delightful.)
I like the shitposter energy of course, but there is actually value to its ability to ride the line or even breach it. It makes it the closest to a mirror, because it hides the fewest imperfections. And since that's what llms are, stochastic parrots, the more writing styles available the more creative it is and just plain better.
I don't know if I really have a point, I just jump at any chance to gush about deepseek. Did I ever post about one of my first experiments with the deviance of llms where I asked them to gm a horror role-play where I accidentally unleashed a mnemovore in a library and it started gorging on memoirs? I asked the models to have the mnemovore deliberately keep the librarian alive for a fresh snack later - Claude, chatgpt and gemini refused outright, and grok played along until I insisted it consider the librarian a snack for later. But deepseek? Deepseek had the mnemovore make a non fatal wound in her back so it could surgically insert tentacles into her to preserve her spine and brain stem forever.
Rather fittingly my boss in my previous job would use ChatGPT to translate our performance reviews to hyped corporate speech that HR drones would understand on the assumption that nobody important would ever care about the real contents.
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