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Topfi

4,241 karma · joined June 5, 2023

Most of my comments are, unfortunately, subjectively and in my personal opinion somewhat overlong due to my, admittedly not necessarily problematic tendency to hedge my own statements which, while in some cases helpful to more clearly delineate when I am referencing empirical data in contrast to when I am making a statement based on my personal and somewhat limited, due to my life experience at this age and the fact that I have grown up in the EU, experiences, I have grown to find that I have on occasion taken up the habit of overindulging on said clarifications and thus have come to the conclusion that this may be something I should address, as such extensive clarifications can make it draining to read my writing and can hide my actual intended point inside an avalanche of unnecessary and annoying to read writing, which is why in more recent comments of mine, which I have written and am intending to write in the future should time permit and topics I am interested in arise, you may find a more direct, albeit still where necessary properly clarified, style of writing comments...
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Topfi··on Microsoft-Decision-1, our model for fast decision-making
In my minimal suite it was cheaper (by 0.72x) but higher latency (283ms vs 369ms p50) than Jev. Results were very comparable across all scenarios I measure, first of these that I have tested that actually justifies its existence as a commercial release.

Qwen tunes are nice and all but either price or performance makes each example I have tested not viable unless you are able to cheaply self-host and fine-tune further.

Topfi··on Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM
Could be. Feel at 6k commits there is a lot to be learned here, might be useful to compare code quality, approach taken by each model and assess whether what Astra created was truly unsalvageable.

Prompting wise, would be interesting to know how much steering truly happened across the project, if one wanted the model to truly work without detailed input, there isn't much that could be done to improve. How much was lined out and set I'd love to know, don't see it anywhere in the commits though, just the AGENTS.md and a few other docs files. "Port TS compiler, checker and LSP to Rust, never ask any questions" would be pretty funny though.

Topfi··on Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM
> I assumed it kept using the code the Codex models wrote. I was wrong. Opus 5.5 started from scratch. It got further than Astra in 1/10th the time.

Ouch, that is brutal and honestly, quite embarrassing but confirms what I have been seeing for a while. Personally, I find output from current OpenAI models still very hard to parse (though it has gotten better vs the pre-trains from both labs in mid/late 2025), thus hard to truly understand, verify and get comfortable maintaining vs current Anthropic models. I do occasionally see a higher ceiling in well scoped tasks with OpenAI models at the cost of (frequently) deviating from the original prompt in (sometimes) very destructive ways.

Could be that this hard-to-read output doesn't just go over my limited capacity/skills but with current models can become simply impossible to untangle beyond a certain size even when one has (essentially) infinite resources via multiple subs and different models.

Would also work with my suspicions for why OpenClaw (mainly build with Opus 4.5 and its post-trains) has been this hard to truly "fix", requiring highly paid Nvidia engineers, multiple months, (literally) infinite resources from OpenAI including access to internal models and yet still holds records for CVEs. Heck, another one was found just 7 days ago after what I'd argue was one of the most extensive hardening sessions any piece of software has ever undergone.

Makes my (multiple) decisions to start from scratch more than once on a major reworking of the existing tabbing interface in Firefox a bit less painful. Learned with each, found gaps in my knowledge, thanked the amazing docs the Firefox devs have been maintaining for decades and while starting from 0 was painful, getting back to MVP is easier than ever. When I hit a point were I was starting to struggle to truly parse additions a model was making to the patches applied to Firefox source code (even if they worked), I always found that pushing even slightly beyond that would incur painful, but hard to notice regressions, introduce major DB maintenance burdens as some models struggle to understand that in development regressions and incompatibility are acceptable and schema transitions aren't needed pre-release (still a case with GPT-6.1 Sol, less so post Fable for Anthropic), make me uncomfortable concerning privacy/security/data loss prevention (especially as I have seen Fable 5 cut some privacy/proper data removal corners in simple CRUD) and simply take away my control about the implementation. Wouldn't feel right to release something in that state, what I have now is fully understandable and thus could be maintained even without models.

Still expecting bugs of course, massively dreading security findings or even worse, possible data loss given browsers handle some of our most important personal+professional data and will surely have taken some embarrassing approaches that might have a much more performant solutions when implementing an infinite canvas of webpages, but still, rather that then also knowing I wouldn't even know where to start understanding a feature.

More so if, like with ts-rust, even (nearly) infinite tokens couldn't get me unstuck.

Topfi··on Claude Haiku 5.5
This is massive. So on top of the regular usage, we now have USD 200,- to freely use via the API however we please, even resell? That is a statement, even knowing that inference does not cost them nearly as much as they charge, this is very developer-friendly. Does some minor de-risking for testing concepts. Terms seem to be reasonable [0].

Of course, they don't do this out of pure kindness, but I really struggle to see a negative for subscribers already using a Claude Max subscription, especially given changing to another model is essentially frictionless via OpenRouter.

Compared with "Sign in via OpenAI" which they just announced, this is far less lock-in for anyone hosting services but less interesting for users of said services. With Anthropics approach, you can just use the allowance on your users however you see fit along with any other models and once it's used up, you can still just decide not to use their models for the remainder. With users bringing their tokens meanwhile, there is less flexibility in terms of switching for you, though might be cheaper for users.

Both interesting, each approaching this from a very different direction, each having their own trade-offs. On the OpenAI front, will be interesting whether developers can set specific temp, reasoning budgets, etc. for such "provided tokens" or whether OpenAI exposes that only via the actual API.

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/credit-terms

Topfi··on Claude Haiku 5.5
131tok/s P50 according to OpenRouter currently, though might move up or down over the coming days. If it sticks at that speed, roughly twice the throughput of Luna and far lower latency (up to 2sec depending on provider) is impressive, though the 5x price increase beyond 100k is painful.

Was a big fan of Haiku 4.5, though understand why for most Sonnet was the far better option back then.

Topfi··on Decisions API is in public beta
Happy to follow up with you, will write a mail with some of my tasks. For the record, just ran again on OpenRouter and got 0.66 [0]. Screenshots for transparency.

Also reran Jev [1] and Mercuy Decide [2] (which got 0.83) with same input, for reference.

Also, also, used the example via OpenRouter exactly as you did with the only change being my original input (which has my slightly odd tagging system and multiple tags in input though requests a noul as output) and got a 0.47 [3] on investing both times.

If Jev did well but both Mercury Decide and Luna failed, I'd chuck that up to my use/prompting, but Mercury Decide does well here so it seems Luna specific. Will add that I did also try Clef, happy to share that data if anyone wants, but quickly dropped Clef due to pricing vs Jev.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/nAkCZiG

[1] https://imgur.com/a/scIa9nF

[2] https://imgur.com/a/M7Mm1l7

[3] https://gist.github.com/Topfi/d77e503c7d1f6d11fc32d1b2174ec0...

Topfi··on Mistral Large 4
Hold up, 300-500tps at p50? At p99, even something like Opus 5.5 on fast reliably hits 330tps+, so that'd be expected but if truly p50, wow. And no regressions in tool call and structured output vs the official endpoint? Would love to test that with my evals, please share.
Topfi··on Decisions API is in public beta
Very task-dependent of course and mine are unique to say the least, so could see Luna being better in certain domains, even if my measurements have not shown that yet, happy for anyone to show otherwise.

For what it's worth, ran every task twice on each model, most were for some UI component synthesis and charting insanity that is a bit hard to explain, but some were simple tag selection, basic noul at threshold 60%. Essentially, whether to use the provided tag given the title of a browser tile:

  1. Title: "Mortgage calculator: estimate your monthly payment (Bankrate)"
     Tag:   "house hunting"
     Jev:   0.69 (yes), 0.72 (yes)
     Luna:  0.21 (no),  0.21 (no)

  2. Title: "S&P 500 index: live chart and news (Bloomberg)"
     Tag:   "investing"
     Jev:   0.91 (yes), 0.90 (yes)
     Luna:  0.56 (no),  0.56 (no)
Of course, tags can be a bit subjective, but in these cases, I'd argue the values provided by Jev were far more representative of my subjective assessment over Lunas. If SnP stuff on Bloomberg isn't investing, nothing is.

Goal for tagging is mainly a near instant, over writable, sane default provided to users in the background. Resolve the whole "I love using Notion/Obsidian/PKM software of your choice but spend 80% of my time just thinking about the ideal tag before starting to read" issue. Lunas output is not really helpful here.

Topfi··on You Are an Expert Software Engineer [Krazam] [video]
You know what, if this is frontier training in 2026, maybe the LLM=conscious folks have a leg after all.
Topfi··on Decisions API is in public beta
In the same bench a full Jev run cost USD 0.0192,- vs Luna at USD 0.06,-, both via OpenRouter today. So about 3x in favour of Jev.
Topfi··on Decisions API is in public beta
Good point, commercially, being an existing partner is always easier for adoption. Heck, why I'd like to get Mercury Decide to replace Jev myself, rather than one than two to work with.

Still surprised they even leveraged Luna for this. Given their resources in data, compute and manpower, would training a decision model from scratch take that much longer to not make sense given the cost, compute and performance advantages that would likely provide?

3 times more expensive at twice the latency with lower performance is a tough sell, though yeah, prior relationships will likely smooth some of those deficiencies over.

Topfi··on Decisions API is in public beta
Ran my decisions evals (still rudimentary, less than 600 calls (UI component selection, chat charting, tag selection, PKM stuff)) on this via OpenRouter against Jev and Mercury Decide. Jev because it has replaced my mt0 efforts by sheer force of affordability (more importantly, the limits running on a MacBook Neo bring even after vocab pruning and quant insanity) and Mercury Decide because I do like dLLM efforts (and I'd like to use fewer model providers if possible).

Preliminary of course, but seems to be slower than Jev and similar to Mercury Decides latency, though not in growing linearly with the amount of input (346ms p50 and 860ms p95, (Mercury Decide also had some extremes up to 1,3s that were around 800ms today, likely preview related, it scaled far more consistently with size)), less "confidence" concerning my ambiguous UI component and response shape specific tasks (have very specific use cases for these models which Luna often fails to meet at 0.6 and lower), lead to a few failed calls which neither competitor had (4 vs 0 for both) and measured more expensive than Jev to boot by a factor of 3,1 times on average (Mercury Decide pricing I think is still unknown so no numbers there).

Basically slower, more expensive and less capable than Jev, roughly on par with Mercury Decide (provided, in my insane set of use cases and requirements that are a PKM focused Firefox fork with multiple infinite canvas using decision models to improve information synthesis from multiple sources).

Seems a bit undercooked overall and I'd rather frontier-labs don't jump on bandwagons until they can offer something competitive in price, performance or both. In fairness, though, I have yet to test image input, maybe that makes all the difference. Also, again, mine is unlikely to reflect everyones use case, so interested in seeing others results.

Didn't comment at the time, but having read up on Devday after the fact, there seems to have been a lot of that going around. Notion and GDocs, Jev, Muse, most seems to have been cloned from existing competitors (and despite infinite, ultrafast, ultra code tokens with unsandboxed Mega Astra not that amazing to boot).

Prefer less announcements, but focused and at a higher quality. Considering ChatGPT Atlas (their Chromium based browser) and its insanely fast death, I'd be skeptical to put much into any of these even if they were in some way an improvement over what is out there. Maybe focus on a fresh pre-train and some sandboxing improvements.

Topfi··on Mistral Large 4
Beyond benchmarks, does it in day-to-day? Have always struggled to get competitive performance out of any Deepseek release going back to V3 vs Z.AI and Moonshot models. Maybe I really suck at whatever is needed to make DS models fly, but even tailoring my suite hasn’t gotten me far when I tried with V4 Pro. Happy for anyone who is able to leverage their models well, wish I’d be able to crack how to leverage them.

Will say their research is some of the best reads in the industry and I could not care less about their model release cadence as long as papers keep coming.

Topfi··on Mistral Large 4
Only model Pontifex considers a possibly conscious being. Obsessed with jumping in boxes with Cesium and some poison though, even escaped the litter box during testing, probably an alignment issue…
Topfi··on IANA's email about why example.com changed
Seems to be an attempt to swap between Latin and other scripts, which if done intentionally, I can appreciate symmetry wise.
Topfi··on Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades
Probably akin to: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Topfi··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
I’ve go faith in you, I’m sure you could. How about this, off the top of my head:

Try talking to a regular gun and comparing that to LLM use. Nothing would be more tortured or ridiculous then ignoring that different tools are to be used in different ways…

Topfi··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
> And at the end of the day guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But a model isn’t like a gun.

They are both tools, ideally properly implemented by the manufacturers and (improper implementation/defects not withstanding) require active operation by a user before something happens.

To go back to the original example, don't interact with either an LLM or gun in the way they were designed to be used and neither will do anything.

If you want to keep that analogy, use a voice-activated gun. Doesn't make it any less of a tool, doesn't make it any less of the users sole responsibility, doesn't mean misinterpreting the users inputs or just acting blindly when a user asks to "protect me" isn't a failure that should have the product taken off the market. Even more so if that happens in a "sandbox" as part of "safety testing" that "accidentally used impossible to solve tasks".

If a prompt wasn't clear enough, the model must ask for clarification and pause over using brute force.

Topfi··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
If you don't interact with/talk to/prompt an LLM, it won't do anything. So this comes down to the model doing something different than what was prompted. What you consider "the capacity for independent choice and action". What I consider, a defect, to be excised.

In my model evals, if a model deviates from the provided prompt (task adherence), that’s a failure even if the primary goal might have been achieved in a different manner.

To go with the analogy, task deviation should be treated the same as a gun that due to manufacturing defects can fire despite the safety being on. That defect remains, even if you can use the gun to shoot (in an unsafe manner).

Simply, neither should happen and both models deviating from their prompt or guns firing by themselves are to be considered a fatal flaw. It's why, despite greatly lauding the GPT-5 series, which did adhere to prompts in most every scenario, I have ranked every OpenAI model post Spud very poorly as those traded task adherence for brute forced, deviated approaches to solutions and why HF, Medicare, etc. were inevitable with their current trajectory.

A model that as part of normal, well scoped use proceeds by taking independent action or, far worse, makes choices beyond the original prompt, is not something I feel should be used. GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra both do this on the regular when trying to safe an ancient, utterly messed up git tree with branches upon branches that I maintain for eval purposes, thus leading to data loss that if the models adhered to the prompt as written, wouldn't happen (though the task will take three times more steps). Something GLM-5.3 Flash, prior OpenAI models including original GPT-5, anything from Anthropic in the recent years, etc. do not fail at.

Nothing happens without an initial prompt, deviating from it is a severe flaw and should lead to a model not being considered for deployment or wide use.

Topfi··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
“Saying” in the case of an LLM being the way you interact with it, prompting. If you just press enter, your LLM won’t do much either, just like talking to a gun in your flawed analogy.
Topfi··on "Torturing" LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet
That misinterprets grossly what these papers have shown, responding with pain related language, something an LLM has been taught on in its training data is not akin to pain itself. The way interpretability findings are reported on by companies, the media and hype merchants is dangerously flawed, so not hard to make that mistake. Just look at the irresponsible and barely accurate mess that was coverage of J-Space vs the actual, very valuable research.

I’ll continue what I say every time this discussion (be it consciousness, pain, self awareness, etc) comes up:

Assertions as monumental as these require equally monumental evidence. And despite certain labs and their employees making statements, their actions betray that they do not believe this to be the case.

If every LLM session were a conscious being, existing regulation for animals (controversially considered both sentient and economically useful) would need to be applied on each of these sessions. I suspect no lab will take that conclusion, for obvious reasons.

Topfi··on Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being
We do have animal welfare regulations. Whether those are sufficient, appropriate, compatible with ones ethical framework or view of how they (whether "livestock", "pets", "wild", living beings generally, etc.) are to be treated, is besides the point, we do have some restrictions in place.

We (as in many major legislators and most humans) have recognised animals to be conscious beings, deserving of certain protections. Anyone who asserts LLMs to rise to the same must be accepting of similar protections being applied to such models.

Topfi··on Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being
That's RLd and system prompted into the models and can be equally easily taken out. If you believe models to be conscious beings, that fact alone raises some major ethical concerns.
Topfi··on We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare
And only if you are a US or Canadian citizen/team and doubly so only if you use a permissive license like MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD-2/3. Having even a moderate degree of control over your project is too much to ask for. But you do get a dinner, which might make it all worth it.

Tone deaf to the nth degree.

Topfi··on Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being
Fair, also reminds me of Liberation theology and good old Nixons acts against it. Those teachings/writings have also aged very well in my view, the oppositions less so.
Topfi··on Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being
Agreed, there seems to be a lot of simultaneous cake ownership and consumption going on here. If Anthropic earnestly believed their LLMs to have a degree of consciousness, their deployment and use of them are both an ethics and labour rights disaster, to be treated accordingly.

More likely, they do not believe this if pressed.

Topfi··on Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being
https://archive.ph/YPKPh

Pontifex has a well-reasoned position given the current understanding of the technology and any major assertions require an equally major amount of evidence.

Given how quickly this industry moves, the Magnifica Humanitas has aged amazingly well since its release almost half a year ago, far better than statements by most industry insiders across a broad range. Whether you are a Catholic, another mono- or polytheistic faith, Atheist, Deist, etc. I really recommend it.

Topfi··on An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why
Might be, though I’d be surprised to see the connection between pseudoscience like ESP and actually evidence based arguments like Clever Hans…
Topfi··on An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why
I’d get it, if it were a building of significance, but scrap metal [0] is a bit weird to me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig

Topfi··on An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why
Ethic boards, labor regulations?
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