What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This?

6 sundache 4 8/13/2025, 9:44:03 AM newyorker.com ↗

Comments (4)

qcnguy · 3m ago
> You didn’t need a bar chart to recognize that GPT-4 had leaped ahead of anything that had come before.

You did though. I remember when GPT-4 was announced, OpenAI downplayed it and Altman said the difference was subtle and wouldn't be immediately apparent. For a lot of the stuff ChatGPT was being used for the gap between 3 and 4 wasn't going to really leap out at you.

https://fortune.com/2023/03/14/openai-releases-gpt-4-improve...

In the lead up to the announcement, Altman has set the bar low by suggesting people will be disappointed and telling his Twitter followers that “we really appreciate feedback on its shortcomings.”

OpenAI described the distinction between GPT-3.5—the previous version of the technology—and GPT 4, as subtle in situations when users are having a “casual conversation” with the technology. “The difference comes out when the complexity of the task reaches a sufficient threshold—GPT-4 is more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced instructions than GPT-3.5,” a research blog post read.

In the years since we got a lot more demanding of our models. Back then people were happy if they got models to write a small simple function and it worked. Now they expect models to manipulate large production codebases and get it right first time. So, the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4 would be more apparent. But at the time, the reaction was somewhat muted.

latexr · 4h ago
Ekshef · 9m ago
Thank you for that!
fuzzfactor · 1h ago
>What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This?

What if it does?

There's a certain type of fear . . .

  "It's the fear . . . they're gonna take my job away . . . "

  It's the fear . . . I'll be working here the rest of my days . . . "
-- David Fahl

Same fear, different day.