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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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No, that is believing the evidence which is available to me.

It's $20 dude, this isn't a "you need to have a personal particle accelerator to participate in the conversation" level of gate keeping. It's "you are saying things about the new york times article that are plainly shown to be untrue to anyone with a subscription", it's fine if you don't want to subscribe to the new york times and can't be bothered to find a pirated copy, but if that's the case you should just not have an opinion on the contested lines of the piece. things are moving quick, 4.5 was a big step up and 4.6 was a big step up from 4.5 if for no other reason than the vastly expanded context window.

AI bros have been claiming that (insert paid model here) is so much better for a long time now (since GPT-4). It's never been true

It was true during gpt-4 and it's true now. Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person. The underlying disputed claims have shifted as the models have shifted so the less ambitious claims of gpt-4 capabilities have since been absorbed into the past, back then people were saying asinine things like that being unable to count the r's in 'strawberry' was proof of the inescapable limitation of AI. Approximately no one was claiming gpt-4 had the capabilities that 5.2 or opus 4.6 have. You might be able to argue that gpt-4 advocates oversold gpt-4(I'd dispute but whatever) but in the wider picture the overselling would be a rounding error, ahead of reality by no more than six months.

These strength gaps between free and paid models aren't vibes, there's a whole industry of benchmarks and evaluations. The free and paid model gap is huge and not disputed by anyone serious.

Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.

I dispute it. Both suffer exactly the same problem: the output they produce is frequently wrong in subtle and insidious ways. This makes both equally useless for work that requires correctness, especially correctness you can't write unit tests for.

That's like saying Einstein and a village idiot both suffer from the "same" problem, they stub their toes at equal rates.

How often they fail is important too.

Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.

I guess I'm not a thinking person then, because GPT-4 was not in my opinion any better than GPT-3. As such I won't continue to waste your time with my brainless ramblings.

Now that's actual insanity. I presume you mean you used GPT 3.5 (because that was the version in the first public ChatGPT release) vs GPT-4.

The actual GPT-3 was a base model, it wasn't instruction tuned.

I actively used GPT 3.5 when I was learning how to code, and found it useful but frustratingly inaccurate. I remember trying GPT-4 during the same period, and it was so much better that I gave up all aspirations of directly switching from medicine to programming and ended up becoming a psychiatrist. Regardless of how good the AI was, I noticed that it was getting better, faster than I was. An excellent choice in hindsight.

If that is your serious opinion, then that is a genuine reason to discount anything you have to say about LLMs. You didn't even need benchmarks, it was as obvious as the performance difference between a rickety tuktuk and a Honda Civic.