662
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
662 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
81802 readers
4454 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Its unpopular because its wrong.
As someone who's been using it in my work for the last 2 years, it's my personal observation that while the models aren't improving that much anymore, the tooling is getting much much better.
Before I used gpt for certain easy in concept, tedious to write functions. Today I hardly write any code at all. I review it all and have to make sure it's consistent and stable but holy has my output speed improved.
The larger a project is the worse it gets and I often have to wrap up things myself as it shines when there's less business logic and more scaffolding and predictable things.
I guess I'll have to attribute a bunch of the efficiency increase to the fact that I'm more experienced in using these tools. What to use it for and when to give up on it.
For the record I've been a software engineer for 15 years
It's overhyped in many areas, but it is undeniably improving. The real question is: will it "snowball" by improving itself in a positive feedback loop? If it does, how much snow covered slope is in front of it for it to roll down?
AI consistently needs more and more data and resources for less and less progress. Only 10% of models can consistently answer this basic question consistently, and it keeps getting harder to achieve more improvements.
I think its far more likely to degrade itself in a feedback loop.
It's already happening. GPT 5.2 is noticeably worse than previous versions.
It's called model collapse.
To clarify : model collapse is a hypothetical phenomenon that has only been observed in toy models under extreme circumstances. This is not related in any way to what is happening at OpenAI.
OpenAI made a bunch of choices in their product design which basically boil down to "what if we used a cheaper, dumber model to reply to you once in a while".
I mean, we're watching it happen. I don't think it's hypothetical anymore.
I'm sorry but no, models are definitely not collapsing. They still have a million issues and are subject to a variety of local optima, but they are not collapsing in any way. It is not known whether this can even happen in large models, and if it can it would require months of active effort to generate the toxic data and fine-tune models on that data. Nobody is gonna spend that kind of money to shoot themselves in the foot.
The funny thing is, in order to get it to the dumber model, they have to run people's queries through a model that selects the appropriate model first. This is resulted in new headaches for AI fans
Yeah that's also something that you have to train for, i'm not super aware of the technicals but model routing is definitely important to the AI companies. I suspect that's part of why they can pretend that "inference is profitable" as they are already trying to squeeze it down as much as possible.
I wonder if the routing is actually going to decrease the overall costs or increase them... Routing looks like it introduces new, unavoidable factors that would cause the costs to increase.
Yeah i remember that Ed article ! I don't think the technical aspects are relevant to the newer generation of models, but yeah of course any attempt to compress inference costs can have side effects : either response quality will degrade for using dumber models, or you'll have re-inference costs when the dumb model shits its pants. In fact the re-inference can become super costly as dumber models tend to get lost in reasoning loops more easily.