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by tptacek 443 days ago
Does any of this matter if you're a person that thinks "AGI" is a silly concept, and just uses these tools for what they're good at currently?

I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm just wondering why I would care that a tech giant has failed to cross the "GPT-5" threshold. What's the significance of that to an ordinary user?
3 comments
faizshah 443 days ago
Yes, the quality of the models is increasing at a slower rate and the race will transition to performance and efficiency.

This is good for self hosters and devs who will be able to run near SOTA models like QwQ locally. I’m near the point where I’m going to cancel my ChatGPT Plus and Claude subscription.

If you’re not already trying to self host, build your own local agents and build your own MCPs/Tools I would encourage you to try it (simple stack: ollama, pydanticAI, fastmcp, QwQ 32B, Llama 3.2 3B). If you don’t have a fancy GPU or M1+ try out QwQ on Groq or Flash 2.0 Lite with the Gemini API, it’s super cheap and fast and they are basically equivalent (if not better) than the ChatGPT you were paying for 16 months ago.

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refulgentis 443 days ago
If you're interested in it as a tool, you can skip this stuff.

This is more for those curious about if AI is tulip bulbs.

There's unintentional ideological camps on AI, one is mad about a financial/interest bubble*, and it is maintained by content like this every 4 to 8 weeks. (randomly selected representative comment, in this same discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43618256)

* reminiscent, to me, of how I felt about Uber for years and years and years until I sort of moved on when it survived COVID.

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apparent 443 days ago
If people think that LLMs will get very good at tons of things, they will invest quite a bit of time figuring out how to work with them (even if they are not that great at useful things right now). If those people then learn that LLMs will never get very good at so many things, they will then tend to invest less time in studying up on how to best use them.

I know I write off some of the time I spend working with LLMs as an investment in the future. If someone told me this is as good as they'll get, I would definitely invest less time working with them.

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