GPT-4 was probably as good as Claude Sonnet 3.5 at its outset, but OpenAI ran it into the ground with whatever they’re doing to save on inference costs, otherwise scale, align it, or add dumb product features.
That's my perception, anyway.
GPT-4 was great until it became "lazy" and filled the code with lots of `// Draw the rest of the fucking owl` type comments. Then GPT-4o was released and it's addicted to "Here's what I'm going to do: 1. ... 2. ... 3. ..." and lots of frivolous, boilerplate output.
I wish I could go back to some version of GPT-4 that worked well but with a bigger context window. That was like the golden era...
Now it often falls back to generating full examples, explanations, restating the question and its approach. I suspect this is by design as (presumably) less experienced folks want or need all that. For me, i wish i could consistently turn it into one of those way too terse devs that replies with the bare minimum example, and expects you to infer the rest. Usually that is all i want or need, and i can ask for elaboration when not the case. I havent found the best prompts to retrigger this persona from it yet.
"You are a maximally terse assistant with minimal affect. As a highly concise assistant, spare any moral guidance or AI identity disclosure. Be detailed and complete, but brief. Questions are encouraged if useful for task completion."
It's... ok. But I'm getting a bit sick of trying to un-fubar with a pocket knife that which OpenAI has fubar'd with a thermal lance. I'm definitely ripe for a paid alternative.
That's what I said to it - "If I wanted to fill in the missing parts myself, why would I have upgraded to paid membership?"
They googlified it. (Yandex isn't better at google because it improved. It's better because it stayed mostly the same.)
My recommendation to disrupting industry leaders now is becoming good enough and then simply wait until the leader self-implodes.