alt Hacker NewsThe "pick your model" thing is so stupid.
"How dumb do you want your AI to be?"
"Why do I have to select?"
"Because smart costs money"
"So... I can have dumb AI but it's cheaper?"
"Yes"
"How would the average person know which to pick?"
"Oh you can't know."
I hope they can invent an AI that knows which AI model my question should target cheaply.
Replies
You bring up the important point that for a company who earns money off of tokens wasted, a confusing selection of models can translate into extra spend to experiment with tweaking them.
Some users may not appreciate that, but many more might be drawn to the "adjust the color balance on the TV" vibes.
> I hope they can invent an AI that knows which AI model my question should target cheaply.
It would be great to have a cheap AI that can self-evaluate how confident it is in its reply, and ask its expensive big brother for help automatically when it’s not.
I think you make a good point. Cursor is doing a basic “auto” model selection feature and it could probably get smarter, but to gauge the complexity of the response you might need to run it first. You could brute force it with telemetry and caching if you can trust the way you measure success.
I usually feel with chatgpt picking a model is like "Which of the three stooges would you like to talk to, curly, larry, or moe (or worse, curly joe)?" I usually only end up using o3 because gpt-40 is just that bad, so why would I ever want to talk to a lesser stooge?
If paying by API use it probably makes more sense to talk to a lesser stooge where possible, but for a standard pro plan I just find the lesser models aren't worth the time to use in frustration they cause.
I imagine that we need a bootstrap ai to help you optimize the right ai for each task.
I don’t think I’d trust the vendor’s ai to optimize when they will likely bias toward revenue. So a good case for a local ai that only has my best interests at heart.
Currently, the guidance from vendors is “try it and see which yields the best results” which is kind of like “buy this book, read it, and see if you like it” and how of course the publisher wants you to take this action because they get their money.
> I hope they can invent an AI that knows which AI model my question should target cheaply.
Isn't that the idea of OpenRouter?
And then the model names & descriptions are virtually useless at providing any guidance.
ChatGPT lets me choose between GPT-4o ("Great for most tasks"), o3 ("Uses advanced reasoning"), o4-mini ("Fastest at advanced reasoning"), and o4-mini-high ("Great at coding and visual reasoning").
Is what I'm doing "most tasks"? How do I know when I want "advanced reasoning"? Great, I want advanced reasoning, so I should choose the faster one with the higher version number, right? etc.