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Comment by vrganj | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I've seen what I would call dramatic improvement since maybe GPT4?

Sure, things got better. But I'd call it iterative more than revolutionary. I still wouldn't trust any of the models to do anything meaningful unattended. They all still do dumb shit all the time.

Plus, even if they were genuinely dramatically better, the businesses sure as hell aren't. They're burning money left and right, they have no moat, Chinese open models are basically equivalent these days. What's the path to profitability, or hell, break-even? How do you envision this being anything but a giant money pit?

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> I'm not sure I've seen what I would call dramatic improvement since maybe GPT4?

LLM conversations online are so weird. Whenever I read things like this it’s like I’m living in a different world than the other person.

GPT4 was almost useless compared to what we have available today.

I mostly use anthropic models, but there was a big step function when claude code came out, and it’s been incremental or a plateau since then.

Opus 4.6 and 4.8 are basically indistinguishable from Fable and Sonnet 5. 4.7 was a hot mess. The guardrails on 4.8 and 5.0 make them worse than 4.6 for many tasks. So, even if Fable is theoretically better, refusals/downgrades make it a worse product in practice. Who cares if it outperforms on 1-2% of real world tasks if 5-10% of tasks are blocked?

I’d bet most people could be downgraded to a 12 month old frontier model, and not notice for a week or so.

Anthropic’s big problem is that open weight models are 0-6 months behind. So, their product is commoditized and margins are never going to be good.

> I’d bet most people could be downgraded to a 12 month old frontier model, and not notice for a week or so.

This is another unbelievable claim. I actually used frontier models from 12 months ago and they were completely different.

It sure is funny how everyone claims the current model is a "dramatic improvement" over the models from X months ago.

You'd think if there had been that many dramatic improvements I'd have to babysit an LLM less frequently.

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