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Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

I paid to upgrade my Anthropic account to pro today, ending a long monogamy with OpenAI, and one thing that struck me was how hard to describe the advantages of one over the other were. I like claude.ai's "style" more, and prefer the "interface" - basically the "way" they talk over the strict correctness of what they said.

Hate on LLM-AIs but if you told me 5 years ago I'd be switching my AI provider because I liked another one's style better, I'd have thought you were bonkers. Shit's come a long way.

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It has definitely come along way, though the goal posts moved too. I bet if we asked you 5 years ago to describe what AI is, you wouldn't describe a massive text prediction loop.

If LLMs suddenly appeared right now and you didn’t have the benefit of hindsight into their internal workings you wouldn’t describe them that way today either, even if it is factual.

Sure, though vuild any blackbox and people wouldn't be able to describe how it works simply by the inputs and outputs. It will tend to look magical, especially if it appears suddenly. That doesn't mean it is magical though (or intelligent, in this case).

Well, I don’t think of it as true AI, of course. But even LLMs can be extremely useful in their own way. I happily pay for them; there have been times (like today) I feel they paid for themselves in a single response!

They’re not culture level Minds, sure, but they can still help massively in the right situation.

5 years ago I was running GPT-2 and generating D&D content with it. I expected much better text prediction loop and here we are.

I am less surprised that it is a text prediction loop than I am surprised at how effective a text prediction loop is. This effectiveness has changed how I think about language on a fundamental level. Yes, the process by which it occurs is relatively simple, but the fact it works is ground breaking.

By “come a long way” do you mean “now exists and has already been commoditized”

it’s too bad Claude Sonnet lags to complete uselessness after a good number of messages are exchanged

Yeah, they have to fix that. ChatGPT used to have the same issue.

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