You are selection biasing towards the most extreme cases of AI absurdity.
> GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 2.6 were released. Reviewers note they're struggling to find tasks the previous versions couldn't handle. The improvements are incremental at best.
I have not seen any claims of this other than Opus 4.6 being weirdly token-hungry.
Perhaps I’m not using the latest and greatest in terms of models. I tend to avoid using tools that require excessive customization like this.
I find it infinitely frustrating to attempt to make these piece of shit “agents” do basic things like running the unit/integrations tests after making changes.
After exceeding the increasingly shrinking session limit with Opus 4.6, I continued with the extra usage only for a few minutes and it consumed about $10 of the credit.
I can't imagine how quickly this Fast Mode goes through credit.
A symptom of the increasing backlash against generative AI (both in creative industries and in coding) is that any flaw in the resulting product is predicate to call it AI slop, even if it's very explicitly upfront that it's an experimental demo/proof of concept and not the NEXT BIG THING being hyped by influencers. That nuance is dead even outside of social media.
AI companies set that expectation when their CEOs ran around telling anyone who would listen that their product is a generational paradigm shift that will completely restructure both labor markets and human cognition itself. There is no nuance in their own PR, so why should they benefit from any when their product can't meet those expectations?
Because it leads to poor and nonconstructive discourse that doesn't educate anyone about the implications of the tech, which is expected on social media but has annoyingly leaked to Hacker News.
There's been more than enough drive-by comments from new accounts/green names even in this HN submission alone.
It cannot be overstated how absurd the marketing campaign for AI was. OpenAI and Anthropic have convinced half the world that AI is going to become a literal god. They deserve to eat a lot of shit for those outright lies.
Maybe the general population will be willing to have a more constructive discussions about this tech once the trillion dollar companies stop pillaging everything they see in front of them and cease acting like sociopaths whose only objectives seem to be concentrating power, generating dissidence and harvesting wealth.
I remember when AI labs coordinated so they didn't push major announcements on the same day to avoid cannibalizing each other. Now we have AI labs pushing major announcements within 30 minutes.
The labs have fully embraced the cutthroat competition, the arms race has fully shed the civilized facade of beneficient mutual cooperation.
Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics will happen - I think Demis isn't savvy in this domain, but might end up stomping out the competition on pure performance.
Elon, Sam, and Dario know how to fight ugly and do the nasty political boardroom crap. 26 is gonna be a very dramatic year, lots of cinematic potential for the eventual AI biopics.
As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.
> As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.
The implicit assumption here is that we have constructed our laws so skillfully that the only path to win a free market competition is by producing a better product, or that all efforts will be spent doing so. This is never the case. It should be self-evident from this that there is a more productive way for companies to compete and our laws are not sufficient to create the conditions.
And yet RAM prices are still sky high. Game consoles are getting more expensive, not cheaper, as a result. When will competition benefit those consumers? Or consumers of desktop RAM?
Not really. Investors with hundreds of billions of dollars have decided it. The process by which capital has been allocated the way it has isn't some mathematically natural or optimal thing. Our market is far from free.
Saying "investors with hundreds of billions decided it" makes it sound like a few people just chose the outcome, when in reality prices and capital move because millions of consumers, companies, workers, and smaller investors keep making choices every day. Big investors only make money if their decisions match what people actually want; they can't just command success. If they guess wrong, others profit by allocating money better, so having influence isn't the same as having control.
The system isn't mathematically perfect, but that doesn't make it arbitrary. It works through an evolutionary process: bad bets lose money, better ones gain more resources.
Any claim that the outcome is suboptimal only really means something if the claimant can point to a specific alternative that would reliably do better under the same conditions. Otherwise critics are mostly just expressing personal frustration with the outcome.
in the short term maybe, in the long term it depends how many winners you have. If only two, the market will be a duopoly. Customers will get better AI but will have zero power over the way the AI is produced or consumed (i.e. cO2 emission, ethics, etc will be burnt)
There aren't any insurmountable large moats, plenty of open weight models that perform close enough.
> CO₂ emissions
Different industry that could also benefit from more competition ? Clean(er) energy is not even more expensive than dirty sources on pure $/kWh, we still do need dirty sources for workloads like base demand, peakers etc that the cheap clean sources cannot service today.
demis is more than qualified. he was politically savvy enough to stay in control of deepmind when it was acquired by google, thats up there with the altman fiasco a year or two ago.
This goes way back. When OpenAI launched GPT-4 in 2023, both Anthropic and Google lined up counter launches (Claude and Magic Wand) right before OpenAI's standard 10am launch time.
I have long since given up trying to understand voting patterns in HN :)
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Sadly it was the core of anti-trust law, since 1970s things have changed.
The predominant view today (i.e. Chicago School view) in both judiciary and executive are influenced by Justice Bork's ideas that consumer benefit being the deciding factor over company's actions.
Consumer benefits becomes opinions of projections by either side of a case about the future, whereas company actions like collusion, pricing fixing or M&A are hard facts with strong evidence. Today it is all vibes on how the courts (or executive) feel .
So now we have Government sanctioned cartels like in Aviation Alliances [1] that is basically based on convoluted catch-22-esque reasoning because it favors strategic goals even though it would be a violation of the letter/spirit of the law.
I wish they’d just stop pretending to care about safety, other than a few researchers at the top they care about safety only as long as they aren’t losing ground to the competition. Game theory guarantees the AI labs will do what it takes to ensure survival. Only regulation can enforce the limits, self policing won’t work when money is involved.
Europe is prematurely regarded as having lost the AI race. And yet a large portion of Europe live higher quality lives compared to their American counterparts, live longer, and don't have to worry about an elected orange unleashing brutality on them.
If the world is built on AI infrastructure (models, compute, etc.) that is controlled by the CCP then the west has effectively lost.
This may lead to better life outcomes, but if the west doesn't control the whole stack then they have lost their sovereignty.
This is already playing out today as Europe is dependent on the US for critical tech infrastructure (cloud, mail, messaging, social media, AI, etc). There's no home grown European alternatives because Europe has failed to create an economic environment to assure its technical sovereignty.
Europe has already lost the tech race - their cloud systems that their entire welfare states rely upon are all hosted on servers hosted by American private companies, which can turn them off with a flick of a switch if and when needed.
When the welfare state, enabled by technology, falls apart, it won't take long for European society to fall apart. Except France maybe.
The last thing I would want is for excessively neurotic bureaucrats to interfere with all the mind-blowing progress we've had in the last couple of years with LLM technology.
Will Opus 4.6 via Claude Code be able to access the 1M context limit? The cost increase by going above 200k tokens is 2x input, 1.5x output, which is likely worth it especially for people with the $100/$200 plans.
It says "subscription users do not have access to Opus 4.6 1M context at launch" so they are probably planning to roll it out to subscription users too.
Man I hope so - the context limit is hit really quickly in many of my use cases - and a compaction event inevitably means another round of corrections and fixes to the current task.
Though I'm wary about that being a magic bullet fix - already it can be pretty "selective" in what it actually seems to take into account documentation wise as the existing 200k context fills.
How is generating a continuation prompt materially different from compaction? Do you manually scrutinize the context handoff prompt? I've done that before but if not I do not see how it is very different from compaction.
I wonder if it's just: compact earlier, so there's less to compact, and more remaining context that can be used to create a more effective continuation
In my example the Figma MCP takes ~300k per medium sized section of the page and it would be cool to enable it reading it and implementing Figma designs straight. Currently I have to split it which makes it annoying.
I mean the systems I work on have enough weird custom APIs and internal interfaces just getting them working seems to take a good chunk of the context. I've spent a long time trying to minimize every input document where I can, compact and terse references, and still keep hitting similar issues.
At this point I just think the "success" of many AI coding agents is extremely sector dependent.
Going forward I'd love to experiment with seeing if that's actually the problem, or just an easy explanation of failure. I'd like to play with more controls on context management than "slightly better models" - like being able to select/minimize/compact sections of context I feel would be relevant for the immediate task, to what "depth" of needed details, and those that aren't likely to be relevant so can be removed from consideration. Perhaps each chunk can be cached to save processing power. Who knows.
But I kinda see your point - assuming from you're name you're not just a single purpose troll - I'm still not sold on the cost effectiveness of the current generation, and can't see a clear and obvious change to that for the next generation - especially as they're still loss leaders. Only if you play silly games like "ignoring the training costs" - IE the majority of the costs - do you get even close to the current subscription costs being sufficient.
My personal experience is that AI generally doesn't actually do what it is being sold for right now, at least in the contexts I'm involved with. Especially by somewhat breathless comments on the internet - like why are they even trying to persuade me in the first place? If they don't want to sell me anything, just shut up and keep the advantage for yourselves rather than replying with the 500th "You're Holding It Wrong" comment with no actionable suggestions. But I still want to know, and am willing to put the time, effort and $$$ in to ensure I'm not deluding myself in ignoring real benefits.
> GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 2.6 were released. Reviewers note they're struggling to find tasks the previous versions couldn't handle. The improvements are incremental at best.
I have not seen any claims of this other than Opus 4.6 being weirdly token-hungry.
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