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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10594 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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I don't know what any of these eval scores mean. I no longer have the ability to intuitively "feel" how much more intelligent each iterative model release is. I don't know how to code. I don't know how to do graduate-level math. These models have been smarter than me for quite some time.

The models can't meaningfully evaluate the balance of a simple custom Magic, the Gathering card.

The point of ARC-AGI was to find tests that were easy for normal humans but difficult or impossible for AI.

So unlike more inscrutable tests like FrontierMath, this one is a little easier to understand. You would easily beat Opus 4.6 on ARC-AGI-3 even though the model is smarter than you in other ways. But you wouldn't beat Astra (at least not in its harness and with a large enough token budget).

This doesn't mean that Astra can do everything on a computer that a human can do, only that it's making real progress.

As someone who uses these models to code every day, I also don't intuitively feel the jump from model to model. I suspect the people who pop out of the woodwork to say there's a huge difference are mostly just disingenuous engagement farmers at this point, with the occasional normal user who just happened to have a specific niche use-case that randomly got big improvements from one model.

Though I will say that I can still feel the difference in the long term. The models today are a step up in terms of coding compared to the models from a year ago, though many issues around context length and basic computer usage still persist.

I'm surprised people aren't humble bragging more about how their work is so fucking heady and sophisticated that they have no choice but to pay a premium for Fable 5.1 all of the time and even being forced to use 5.0 would delay completion of the Dyson sphere by years.

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