Comment by derrida | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derrida | Hacker News Reader

Has ChatGPT gotten worse over past few months or is it I just have seen other things higher quality, or they stopped caring about user or something?

All of a sudden feels like it gives me boilerplate and boiler plate of PR and cheesy reasoning, and like no actual answers - worse even - highly confident wrong answers that it then seeks to justify or explain (like it doesn't seem humble enough to be like "Actually, got that wrong" or if challenged it just caves over, accepts too readilythe assumptions in what the user is asking, or just blindly accepts a premise of the question) it's almost useless, like before it used to seem like could get it to emulate the way a certain writer or discourse speaks, now it seems like this derpy highschool just wants to be in kid that went into public relations and the language no matter what the topic seems always the same, it's really spammy feeling,

I could be asking it questions about like how medieval monks talked about light and the breath in latin and it will be replying like I'm interested in monetising or improving my lifestyle or some b.s. I don't think it used to be this way?

reminds of a circa 2003-6 wordpress sites - blackhat seo - feeling to generate back links to push affiliate links or something, with markov generated content designed to push back links for the actual human written landing page

It's not like this on the other llms, something's up.

Or maybe they have just found the niche and it is a bunch of people who do think like that - like I dunno - middle management the world over

that is scary ... bonus ghastly incantations of the epistemology of middle management

That's how ChatGPT always seemed to me. One of the reasons I exclusively use other models is it would rather make something up than say "I can't find anything about that."

But I'm starting to wonder about something.

I've noticed a lot of people claiming the models—all the models from all the big providers—are deteriorating, and then go on to describe the problems that skeptics picked up on during their first few days of usage.

The models really could be getting worse. I haven't noticed anything but I don't know.

But do you think its possible that this is more akin to a honeymoon period? Depending on how you use the system and a fair bit of luck, the problems may show up for you pretty early, or may take a while to become obvious.

It's gotten bad enough that I finally cancelled this month in protest. It's not just you.

people have been talking about "models of models" for arbitration opportunity in inference for about 1.5 yrs.

Arbitration idea: if a user doesn't need high QOS of newest LLM, slip them a cheaper LLM, run their query at reduced quality. measure if they cost you fewer $s in the lower QOS. => profit.

For chatgpt the arbitration opportunity looks more like "we could allocate this amount of gpu to training or inference, we are losing money if we offer the highest quality infra"

In addition there's other interesting economics scaling that can be done outside of "models of models" that are far more profitable. I won't go over all of them (and some of them I feel are quite powerful) but the laziest one is that subscription models count on some zombie users as a counterweight to highly expensive single users, and as a source of stable cashflow.

Zombie users are ones that are paying for sub but not actively or barely using the service

They made a big point of explicitly advertising this as a feature with the GPT-5 rollout, no? Routing to cheaper models/less reasoning depending on the input prompt.

There's potentially some discussion of this publicly to investors. I feel there's more going on there and is re: quality issues described above.

I think you have it set to the wrong mode. If you set it to Thinking with “Extended” thinking effort, is it slower but almost never wrong (because it searches the web to get verify all its assumptions and answers).

Yeah I set thinking as my default and never looked back. It’s my daily driver and extended thinking is usually not too slow. The way that the “instant” model trades quality for speed is not worth it and I don’t need the instant gratification. (But I also don’t do entertainment chatting so ymmv.)

All models are variable in quality simply because they need to do some financial engineering to make the financial standing somewhat healthier. There’s a lot of fear in the market and need for signalling around the viability of the business of llm models and generating returns on invested capital.

If I recall correctly, in their pivot to Codex they took a sizable amount of compute away from ChatGPT

Set your default mode to thinking and set some custom instructions. Night and day difference in UX.

Are you using the free or the paid version? Did you try personalization settings other than the default?

Are you using the free service or paid? Because when the free service drops back to older or smaller models, there are noticeable quality differences.

> ghastly incantations of the epistemology of middle management

I mean, LLM writing has been like that from the early on. Its most perfect niche for writing is the LinkedIn blog post.

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