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Comment by kozikow | Hacker News Reader

> Almost every time I use an AI chatbot it eventually turns out it's lying to me. I would not trust them with any of the things you mention.

If you talk to free chatgpt, sure.

But if you launch Opus 5.5 in claude code - for some reason Opus is the smartest for me, even for "general" type of questions, when launched from Claude Code. It has harness/prompts optimized for correctness, while more "customer-grade" products, even when used with top model tend to optimize for latency. And I tend to give "context" - e.g. I have "personal wiki" + skills for lots of those things.

I don't recall i last few weeks where Opus 5.5 in CC made an obvious lie, made an unreasonable assumption, or made a mistake that smart human couldn't make. E.g. if it "failed" it failed in a way that non-genius human could fail in similar way.

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opus 5.5 uses agents and skills in chat sessions as well and maintains internal context that it tries to distill from what you provide

I tried to have it write a synopsis website for the different types of dance patterns in Dance Dance Revolution, with guides on their execution, explanations, and provided song sources. I provided all of the source articles and search websites needed for it to be able to do that, and gave it a sample set I wanted it to utilize and build off of.

It has bits and pieces of information wrong in 90% of the sections it created. Poor song choices, missing song choices, incorrect explanations, incorrect step-patterns, the list goes on.

If you're not an expert in a given field for which you're using it, it's going to look like a genius. If you are, it's untrustworthy and borderline useless.

Maybe it wouldn't be if there were ample training data on my topic, but there isn't.

It utilized the research from millions of papers many very close to the destination answer to make those proofs. What would it do on something that isn't supported like that? Be confidently wrong while sounding right. That's what we've seen repeatedly.

> If you're not an expert in a given field for which you're using it, it's going to look like a genius.

For someone highly literate, llms aren't going to help you write better. If you're borderline functionally illiterate (this is > 50% of the population according to some studies), I'm sure the llms are awesome.

I've long thought the same about all the hype around coding (plenty of examples from years ago now), but will continue to test the new models. They are improving.

I think my anxieties would be different if I were confident a DDR guide full of lies would be spurned and unprofitable.

In a way, I'm not worried about the LLMs per se as much as a kind of moral and ethical collapse. A debasement of the currency of communication, a market of intellectual-lemons.

I saw electroboom's latest video lamenting facebook AI slop about electricity, such as a way to wire a three-way switch that blows a fuse when you turn the light on. For some reason, I am shadowbanned on HN.

I see your comment, perhaps it was a delay between representations or nodes?

It’s sort of weird how

1) open weights and cheap models are only about 6 months behind the frontier in evals, but…

2) it’s always the premium model that only the biggest fans pay for, that’s just now finally achieved enlightenment.

Oh well, I guess we’ll see in another 6 months.

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