If google had to face the reality that distilling their search engine into multiple case-specific engines would have resulted in vastly superior search results, they surely would done (or considered) it.
Fortunately for them a monolith search engine was perfectly fine (and likely optimal due to accrued network effects).
OpenAI is basically signaling that they need to distill their monolith in order to serve specific segments of the marketplace. They've explicitly said that they're targeting STEM with this one. I think that's a smart choice, the most passionate early adopters of this tech are clearly STEM users.
If the tech was such that one monolith model was actually the optimal solution for all use cases, they would just do that. Actually, this is their stated mission: AGI. One monolith that's best at everything is basically what AGI is.
That said I often run into a sort of opposite issue with Claude. It's very good at making me feel like a genius. Sometimes I'll suggest trying a specific strategy or trying to define a concept on my own, and Claude enthusiastically agrees and takes us down a 2-3 hour rabbit hole that ends up being quite a waste of time for me to back track out of.
I'll then run a post-mortem through chatGPT and very often it points out the issue in my thinking very quickly.
That said I keep coming back to sonnet-3.5 for reasons I can't perfectly articulate. Perhaps because I like how it fluffs my ego lol. ChatGPT on the other hand feels a bit more brash. I do wonder if I should be using o1 as my daily driver.
I also don't have enough experience with o1 to determine if it would also take me down dead ends as well.
Really interesting point you make about Claude. I’ve experienced the same. What is interesting is that sometimes I’ll question it and say “would it not be better to do it this way” and all of a sudden Claude u-turns and says “yes great idea that’s actually a much better approach” which leaves me thinking; are you just stroking my ego, if it’s a better approach then why didn’t you suggest it?
However I have suggested worse approaches on purpose and sometime Claude does pick them up as less than optimal
But the difference is that it actually asks questions. And also that it actually rolls with what you ask it to do. Other models are stubborn and loopy.
I agree with this but o1 will also confidently take you into rabbit holes. You'll just feel worse about it lol and when you ask Claude for a post mortem, it too will find the answer you missed quickly
The truth is these models are very stochastic you have to try new chats whenever you even moderately suspect you're going awry
Usually, the words 'astroturfing' and 'propaganda' aren't reserved for describing the marketing strategies of valuable products/ideologies. Maybe reconsider your terminology.
I think this is the correct take. There might be a small bubble burst initially after a bunch of US stocks retrace due to uncertainty. But in the long run this should speed up the proliferation of productivity gains unlocked by AI.
I think we should not underestimate one aspect: at the moment, a lot of hype is artificial (and despicable if you ask me). Anthropic says AI can double human lifespan in 10 years time; openAI says they have AGI behind the corner; META keeps insisting on their model being open source when they in fact only release the weights. They think - maybe they are right - that they would not be able to get these massive investments without hyping things a bit but deepseek's performance should call for things to be reviewed.
Based on reports from a16z the US Government likely wants to bifurcate the top-tier tech and bring it into DARPA, with clear rules for how capable anything can be that the public will be able to access.
I consider it unlikely that the new administration is philosophically different with respect to its prioritization of "national security" concerns.
I am a professor of Neurobiology, I know a thing or two about lifespan research. To claim that human lifespan can be doubled is crazy per se. To claim it can be done in 10 years by a system that does not even exist is even sillier.
Once chatGPT and Claude (through MCP) added web search functionality I completely dropped Perplexity. I assume I'm not unique in this regard. Feels like the writing is on the wall for Perplexity.
I assume he's just being over dramatic. I use Perplexity every day, multiple times per day, and it almost completely replaced Google for me in such areas as coding or technological research. Also, I never used nor planning to use ChatGPT or Claude (I use private open models instead - Mistral Nemo, Qwen, etc.). But I also feel like "I'm not unique in this regard", lol.
It's mostly a decision to manage the total amount I spend on LLM tools. Given unlimited money I suppose I'd still be subscribed to Perplexity because the UI is slightly better than Claude and chatGPT for web results. But Claude and chatGPT are plenty enough for my web use cases while allowing me full access to all of their models for non web search use cases.
Yeah, I keep using the $1/mo promotions for Perplexity but I only really use it because it can read the results to me which I use for practicing foreign languages, so there's that.
I also prefer Claude after trying the same options as you.
That said I can't yet confidently speak to exactly why I prefer Claude. Sometimes I do think the responses are better than any model on ChatGPT. Other times I am very impressed with chatGPT's responses. I haven't done a lot of testing on each with identical prompt sequences.
One thing I can say for certainty is that Claude's UI blows chatGPT's out of the water. Much more pleasant to use and I really like Projects and Artifacts. It might be this alone that has me biased towards Claude. It makes me think that UI and additional functionality is going to play a much larger role in determining the ultimate winner of the LLM wars than current discussions give it credit for.
reply