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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

> We will never know for sure, it is equally likely they did some cost savings which caused a reduction in quality.

That is entirely not equally likely, and would be completely unprecedented, at the frontier of an emerging technology that people are pumping the money and the future of the world into to win.

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Aggressive quantization by itself could explain the quality difference.

Combined with stricter guardrails, I would certainly expect intelligence to go down.

Check out the tikz unicorn drawing example from the paper "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" (pdf page 7)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf

No matter how much money they pump into it there is a finite number of GPUs. Money can’t make GPUs appear out of thin air. If they’re faced with the choice of lowering quality slightly or turning away new customers, it shouldn’t be surprising if they choose lowering quality.

that sounds very naive to me, you think the "future of the world" matters to corporations making the business decision to save money and increase profit short-term? That idea is so alien to me we might as well live on a different planet.

If you take the phrase "future of the world" to mean something positive in this context, you might be the naive one.

A technology that is expensive to run and hard to scale. They’re doing work trying to scale, in what world is this unprecedented?

The part that is unprecedented would be giving up an edge in a battle that will win you the world if you win the battle, by saving a few bucks. At the highest level (think OpenAI/Microsoft, Google) money is not going to be the lynchpin for a long, long time. This thing is too close to "forever good enough" at way too many things to lose your edge by being too clever by half.

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