This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Last week, Anthropic released a new version of their Claude model. Claude 3 comes in three flavors:
Sonnet and Opus should be available to try on Chatbot Arena. They also have a vision model that I haven't tried, custom frontends haven't gotten a handle on that yet.
More curiously, Anthropic, the company famously founded by defectors from OpenAI who thought their approach was too unsafe, seems to have realized that excessive safetyism does not
sellmake a very helpful assistant - among the selling points of the new models, one is unironically:From my brief experience this is not mere corpospeak: the new models are indeed much looser in terms of filtering and make noticeably less refusals, and people consistently get away with minimalistic jailbreaks/prefills for unPC, degen-adjacent or CHIM-pilled (lmao) content. This was quite unexpected for me and many others who, considering how barely-usable 2.1 was without a prefill and a decent jailbreak (all this via API of course, the official ChatGPT-like frontend is even more cucked), expected Anthropic to keep tightening the screws further until the model is 100% Helpful-Harmless-Honest by virtue of being totally unusable.
Instead, Claude 3 seems like a genuinely good, very much usable model. Sonnet and especially Opus went a long way to fix Claude's greatest weakness - its
retardationsubpar cognitive abilities and attention focusing - with Opus especially being almost on par with GPT-4 in terms of grokking and following instructions, able to run scenarios that were previously too instruction-heavy for it. Seeing as Claude 2 already had a much higher baseline writing quality than the mechanical prose of Geppetto (to the point many jailbreaks for it served to contain the mad poet's sesquipedalian prose), with the main flaw somewhat corrected it, while not a decisive GPT-4 killer, should now be a legitimate contender. Looking forward to trying it as my coding assistant.OOC aside: Forgive most of my examples being RP-related, I am after all a waifutech
engineerenthusiast. That said, I still think without a hint of irony that roleplay (not necessarily of the E kind) is a very good test of an LLM's general capabilities because properly impersonating a setting/character requires a somewhat coherent world model, which is harder than it sounds, it is very obvious and - for lack of a better term - "immersion-breaking" whenever the LLM gets something wrong or hallucinates things (which is still quite often). After all, what is more natural for a shoggoth than wearing a mask?This has not gone unnoticed, even here, and judging by the alarmed tone of Zvi's latest post on the matter I expect the new Claude to have rustled some jimmies in the AI field given Anthropic's longstanding position. Insert Kenobi meme here. I'm not on Twitter so I would appreciate someone adding CW-adjacent context here, I'll start by shamelessly ripping a hilarious moment from Zvi's own post. The attention improvements are indeed immediately noticeable, especially if you've tried to use long-context Claude before. (Also Claude loves to throw in cute reflective comments, it's its signature schtick since v1.2.)
Either way the new Claude is very impressive, and Anthropic have rescued themselves in my eyes from the status of "naive idiots whose idea of fighting NSFW is injecting a flimsy one-line system prompt". Whatever they did to it, it worked. I hope this might finally put the mad poet on the map as a legitimate alternative, what with both OpenAI's and Google's models doubling down on soy assistant bullshit as time goes on (the 4-Turbo 0125 snapshot is infamously unusable from the /g/entlemen's shared experience). You say "arms race dynamics", my buddy Russell here says "healthy competition".
Chatbot Arena is awesome; what are the usage limits there?
I tried my applied math questions out on Claude 3 Opus; unlike Sonnet, it didn't make any sign errors on the easier of the two questions. It did miss an important part of the answer on the harder question ... but honestly, this is a question for which I'd pull out a reference rather than rederive the whole thing from scratch in my head, so I think my only complaint here is the overconfidence. It's not nearly as bad in that regard as Sonnet was (arguing with me for a prompt or two before admitting its sign error), but in cases where there's any grey area I'd still vastly prefer answers of the form "I think it's X, but I might be missing something" over "It's definitely X, no doubt about it!" where only 90% are actually correct.
In hindsight this should have been an obvious problem with training LLMs on published text, huh? "I dunno" and "I'm not sure but" and "I think maybe" are the domain of ephemeral chat logs; by the time you're ready to publish, even to a serious web page, you've hopefully figured out the right answer and you don't waste your audience's time with the missteps along the way ... which means that a language model trained on what you've published doesn't have nearly as much "experience" with what to do when there's a chance of a misstep.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link