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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Last week, Anthropic released a new version of their Claude model. Claude 3 comes in three flavors:

  • Haiku, the lightweight 3.5-Turbo equivalent
  • Sonnet, basically a smarter, faster and cheaper Claude 2.1
  • Opus, an expensive ($15 per million tokens) big-dick GPT-4-tier model.

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 sell make a very helpful assistant - among the selling points of the new models, one is unironically:

Fewer refusals

Previous Claude models often made unnecessary refusals that suggested a lack of contextual understanding. We’ve made meaningful progress in this area: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku are significantly less likely to refuse to answer prompts that border on the system’s guardrails than previous generations of models.

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 retardation subpar 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 engineer enthusiast. 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".

Unless I've misunderstood the pricing, you have to pay 15 USD per 1 million input tokens, but also 75 USD per 1 million output tokens...? And one token is anything from one letter/number to one word?

How expensive does that get per year, if you ask let's say 3 questions per day to Opus? How fast would the output tokens run out? I tried to have gpt 3.5 answer this question but it messed up the calculation...

At risk of stating the obvious - input tokens are everything you feed to the LLM, output tokens are everything you get back out of it. A word is usually 1 to 3 tokens, assorted markdown also eats tokens. The context window = input cap is 200k tokens, any more physically won't fit. For example, @gattsuru's Moby Dick prompt and Sonnet's response are 17 and 202 tokens respectively according to Claude's tokenizer. I'll take a blind shot based on my experience and say the average response for e.g. coding questions weighs 400-700 output tokens depending on how much detail you want. Do the math. For comparison, GPT-4's pricing is $30/1M input and $60/1M output, so you may wish to weigh your choice against your use case, GPT-4 IMO still has an edge over Claude in terms of cognition if writing style is a non-factor.

Input tokens usually matter less, unless you like to keep track of the chat history instead of asking isolated questions (I do, obviously), or your use case is feeding it giant swathes of text that must be digested.

Ok, this gives me some idea. Thanks.

Claude isn't available in my country, sadly. Nor in many other European countries. :(

openrouter.ai has it available.

Neat. Thanks! Anything I should know about using that site? Do you trust it?

Trust..? I just ask it code questions, lol. They can sniff my 40k token Vulkan demo if they like.

Ok, but... as a non-coder and novice to LLMs etc I find the site confusing. The docs section is just filled with code snippets I understand nothing of. Who do I pay the money to in order to use e.g. Claude Opus? Do I pay per token or the full 75+15 USD at once for 1 million input+output tokens?

Yeah sorry, I didn't realize how confusing this would be. I use it with a custom LibreChat setup, but if the install steps start with "edit this yaml file and then docker compose up -d" they're not really very accessible. No, you can just use it like this:

  • sign in
  • link a credit card (or bitcoin) in Account>Settings>Credits
  • put a few bucks on the site
  • click the Chat link at the top
  • add Claude 3 Opus from the Model dropdown
  • deselect every other model
  • put your question in the text box at the bottom.

No, it's pay-as-you-go. You can see your per-query costs in the Account>Activity page.

Note that the default settings (lil arrow on the model) are very conservative, you may want to raise memory and max tokens.

More comments

From what I heard through the grapevine their policy on contentious content is mercurial and prone to changing, and their Claude 3 keys are "self-moderated", i.e. there is no strict moderation per se but the keys are injected with prefills/system prompts that complicate (but don't strictly deny) getting non-kosher and/or copyrighted outputs out of it. If that is not a problem they're a pretty reliable source from what anons say.