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flecomet • yesterday at 10:26 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I don't agree that they get uniformly better at everything, especially subjective skills.

For example, they have become more and more unintelligible when you ask for explanations or descriptive text. They assume you see the same context as them and shortcut explanations.

I've had to craft a skill to get them to produce remotely understandable explanations of even mildly complex/non-mainstream subjects.

This may be Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge on their part, and it also impacts human experts but still. Becoming better at one thing does not mean you become better at everything else, although I do agree with you that the better they become the more things there are they become good at, but their ability is still quite jagged and maybe increasingly so.


Replies

howunfortunate • yesterday at 11:32 PM

The delineation between knowledge and intelligence is useful here.

Knowledge can occasionally get in the way of some tasks, such as a master illustrator trying to draw like a child. Or as you've mentioned, an expert trying to explain to a beginner.

Even so, I disagree with you about model progress on communication - maybe there's a little jaggedness between minor model versions, but Opus 5.5 is a much much better communicator than, say, Claude 3 Opus.