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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT launched with GPT-3.5. We're now at o1 and o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1, but even in the last year with GPT-4 and GPT-4o, it became better than almost everything involving text than average human. It writes better than average person, faster and cheaper. It parses unstructured data better than average person. There's large number of everyday tasks for which it's perfectly reasonable today to just throw them at ChatGPT. That's all last 1 to 1.5 years.

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Oh, we have new letter-number combinations now. That is amazing. I stand corrected.

If you haven't tried using them then I am not sure your opinion on them is any good.

I dare say I'm more familiar with the capabilities of the leading models than certain big tech CEOs are, at least judging by their publicly communicated opinions.

I use the 4o very often in my work and it mostly sucks. Sometimes it’s very good, sometimes it has nice knowledge that was faster to find from it than a search engine. Mostly it spouts out unhelpful noise (for my problems).

I’m sure if you need to make a to-do list in react it’s like magic (until the app gets complicated). In real world use, not so much.

(Also I have often code reviewed PRs from people who are heavy users and surprise surprise - their output is trash and very prone to bugs or being out of spec.)

I also think 4o sucks, but have you tried DeepSeek R1 (free on their website)? I thought it night and day between 4o and o3-mini on the following topics:

- reverse engineering: when fed assembly (or decomp or mock impl), it's been consistently been able to figure out what the function actually does/why it's there from a high-level perspective. Whereas ChatGPT merely states the obvious

- very technical C++ questions: DSR1 gives much more detailed answers, with bullet points and examples. Much better writing style. Slightly prone to hallucinations, but not that much

- any controversial topic: ChatGPT models are trained to avoid these because of its "safety" training

ChatGPT is a bit better (and faster) at writing simple code and doing some math faster, but that's it.

(obviously, common sense about what to share and not to share with these chatbots still apply, etc.)

You can access DeepSeek R1? For me, both chat and API have been down for over a week now (it shut down minutes after I topped up my account and generated an API key - I never got to use it :/).

There's lots of fiddling with these models. I found Claude 3.5 Sonnet to be superior to both GPT-4o and o1-preview in around 99% of the things I do; I only started comparing it against o3-mini, and right now it's a mixed bag. Then again, I tend to develop and refine specific prompts for Sonnet, which I haven't for o1-preview and o3-mini, so that could be a factor. Etc.

> You can access DeepSeek R1?

Yes, well, I live in the EU and thus can avoid US work hours and Chinese peak hours. I think availability has been a bit better since they disabled websearch (also I noticed DSR1 half a week before it made the mainstream news).

> There's lots of fiddling with these models.

Agreed

I live in the EU too. For me, the status page[0] shows a continuous API outage for the past 8 days, that is still ongoing. Since it started, my API requests bounce back with an error, which changes seemingly at random between "unauthorized" and "insufficient balance". Neither of those reasons are valid, since I'm using a valid API key I made after creating an account, which I topped up with $20 (and have an invoice from them to prove it). I must have had a mightily bad luck that the service went down soon after I generated the API key - I'm guessing my user/key is currently stuck in the middle of some migration, or possibly wasn't captured in a backup and got subsequently wiped. For now, I'll just patiently wait for them to fix their service.

[0] - https://status.deepseek.com/

AFAIK it's hosted on Chutes for free too (though limited to between 2k and 10k output tokens). Azure as well, though it might be ratelimited there (or at least it is through openrouter)

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