One possibility is that with Israel focused on Iran and Gaza, other countries take it as an opportunity to attack Israel. The U.S. escalates in defense of Israel, other countries escalate and start including U.S. bases as targets (becoming defacto allies of Iran in the process), and it all spirals from there.

How about a $10 billion fine for OpenAI for every mistake? Make it hurt. Make them pull the plug on this travesty.

Thanks!

It goes beyond the problems introduced by the model router, though. I have to work with GPT 5.2 for my job (along with Claude, Gemini, and a few others), and we have enterprise API access to it. So when I select GPT 5.2 as the model to use, it’s spending tokens to actually use it.

And it’s pretty bad. It’s noticeably worse than the 4.x series. I find myself having to fix its mistakes far more often.

I’ve struggled to reason out an explanation, and model collapse really seems like a contender, especially if you follow information theory and why training these things is so hard.

As it happens, there’s a new talk about exactly this from George D. Montañez. You might find it interesting: https://youtu.be/ShusuVq32hc

Then why are newer versions of the major models performing so poorly? For instance, GPT 5.2 is definitely not an improvement over 4.5. What’s the root cause?

And that is why I no longer buy anything from them. I’m just embarrassed it took me as long as it did to realize what they were really doing.

I mean, we’re watching it happen. I don’t think it’s hypothetical anymore.

It’s already happening. GPT 5.2 is noticeably worse than previous versions.

It’s called model collapse.

Oh, the guy from Hermit Tech! He’s great, and his blog is hilarious and poignant in turns (though sometimes both at the same time).

You wanna know who really bags on LLMs? Actual AI developers. I work with some, and you’ve never heard someone shit all over this garbage like someone who works with neural networks for a living.

They’re also not providing a large language model, so they actually did have a path to profitability. It’s keeping LLMs updated and running that costs so much money that companies trying to do so are losing billions, and Midjourney doesn’t have that problem.

It’s just that their path to profitability was built on plagiarism on an astonishing scale. You’re spot on, they should have been utterly destroyed right at the start.

And it’s not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they’re putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.

The weirdest thing about all this is that by sheer accident, the QAnon freaks actually managed to find a tiny sliver of truth: There really is a cabal of powerful child abusers. It’s just that they got every single other detail, including who the child abusers are, insanely wrong.

I have a work-supplied laptop with Windows on it. I use it maybe once or twice a month, just for the things requiring a VPN. The rest of the time it sits there gathering dust while I get real work done on my Linux laptop.

The specs on the work laptop say it should be a performance beast, but my Linux machine (with half the RAM) runs circles around it.

I’m watching that happen in my industry (software development). There’s this massive pressure campaign by damn near everyone’s employers in software dev to use LLM tools.

It’s causing developers to churn out terrible, fragile, unmaintainable code at a breakneck pace, while they’re actively forgetting how to code for themselves.

A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It’s got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.

Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I’ll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.

What mystifies me about all this is that it’s obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.

When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can’t get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don’t want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.

Shit’s gonna get stupid, fast.

Jails concentration camps

???

We can’t vote with anything but our wallets here, so this is a thing we can do to at least reduce their income. And considering they’re losing close to $100 million every day already, I can’t help but suspect nickel and diming them a bit still hurts.