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Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

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Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#791

Post by argee »

valleyer wrote: post #781
argee wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. This is potentially expensive advice (at least for many mainstream options). Where an English word like "literature" is one token, a couple of Chinese characters that spell a word can be 4 tokens. You'll pay more for input/output and get less of a context window (per word) too.

Incidentally, according to https://gpt-tokenizer.dev , in gpt-5, "literature" is two tokens ("liter" + "ature"), whereas "文学" is one.

My bad, the English word I had in mind was "technology" (技術) but I misremembered due to feeling like "tech" should be its own token.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#793

Post by Espressosaurus »

saaaaaam wrote: post #531
paimapi wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a wide array of assessments when it comes to reading comprehension. the one you refer to, the GRA, sets the 'sixth grade level' as whether or not a reader understands the author's main points, is able to answer conceptual questions related to the text, and then apply those to relevant situations. beyond this level is the ability to essentially be skeptical of a text and to know how to critically analyze it. s…

I’m inherently skeptical of big walls of text like this these days. (So here’s a big wall of text of my own!) However, a lot of what is written here makes sense. And particularly “if your comprehension level stops [here] you get 'big words in complex sentence structure sounds smart and right so it is smart and right' even if the reasoning and process is poor” This is exactly the problem. And another point you make: >…

The problem is one of expertise, sometimes general, sometimes specific.

If you don't know better, you don't know better to question what the AI says.

I've seen this in the work environment with a coworker who insisted that I implement my side of the control system using the control law ChatGPT recommended instead of building off the empirically tuned control law. I eventually sectioned off a part of the codebase for him to work on independently.

Needless to say he didn't get a whole lot farther.

Later characterization of the entire system end-to-end showed the existing system was already close to the theoretical limits and ChatGPT's tearup would have bought us precisely nothing except for more work to tune the new control loop.

And I see this in everything that requires expertise. You need to know enough to know when it's bullshitting you, and it's hard to be enough of an expert in everything to tell when it's bullshitting you for something you aren't enough of an expert in.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#794

Post by jofzar »

jmstfv wrote: post #529
adamcharnock wrote: post #232

My latest trick (literally from yesterday) is to just ask it to write according to ISO 24495-1, the standard for plain language: > [This standard is] for anybody who creates or helps create documents. The widest use of plain language is for documents that are intended for the general public. However, it is also applicable, for example, to technical writing, legislative drafting or using controlled languages. You don'…

I also added this custom instruction in Codex: "Only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English."

Yeah I'm using this and have been happy with it.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#795

Post by edg5000 »

kingleopold wrote: post #465
edg5000 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can use OpenRouter pricing to get an idea about what competitive inference pricing is like without R&D or other costs, and indeed we'd be screwed if we had to pay those rates. We'd go from 100-200 USD to 2000-4000 USD/m.

no if prices were that high, millions of developers would switch to hand writing, open source LLM help and outsourcing at those levels, AI companies know this, you should too.

If OpenRouter prices aren't competitive, the providers would need a cartel to sustain that. It's a commodity market.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#798

Post by galaxyLogic »

fluoridation wrote: post #652
galaxyLogic wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An observation: You can never insult an LLM, but it can certainly insult you. You can not insult it because it does not care, because it does not have "feelings". But you do.

Nitpick: The word you meant to use is "offend", not "insult". Just because you can't cause offense to a toaster doesn't mean you can't insult it.

Depends on how we understand the word "insult". Can you really insult inanimate objects? :-)

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#799

Post by seanhunter »

peddling-brink wrote: post #694
sshine wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I was talking to a person who constantly used a phrase they liked I would notice it and it is possible I might get irritated by it There are sociological reasons why this happens less with humans: 1. You cycle your dumb repetitive jokes with everyone you meet, so nobody hears it twice 2. Those who know you well will notice when you're just repeating ("dad jokes") 3. As a person's idiosyncrasies are beginning to…

This is conjecture, but why couldn't they hire the writing equivalent of a voice actor? Honestly I don't think it would take much. Doing it ethically would take a little more money, but not much, for them. Hire a prolific author with the writing equivalent of the "midwestern accent". I have a terrible writing accent, so it couldn't be me, but these people are out there. Pay them a bunch of dollars to ingest their ent…

They already do this at massive scale during the training process (apart from the paying the author part).

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#800

Post by alfiedotwtf »

IgorPartola wrote: post #540
Panoramix wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, and the load-bearing part of the argument is not what you think it is. Two ambiguities worth resolving before moving on: whether what you wrote also applies to ChatGPT, and whether you have custom instructions set up. Failure mode worth flagging explicitly: I didn't read TFA. (I'm becoming allergic to how these things write).

I am curious why LLM writing has such an uncanny valley feel to it. Like if I was talking to a person who constantly used a phrase they liked I would notice it and it is possible I might get irritated by it, but I wouldn’t necessarily. In high school I had a teacher that would say “that type of thing” a lot. One time my friend and I counted it during one class period and he averaged to use the phrase every 48 seconds…

I’d guess it’s because that’s exactly how its System Template was written to do
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