You would be sorely mistaken to think I'm utterly uninformed about LLM-research, even if I would never dare to claim to be a domain expert.

I dare say that in some ways, we understand LLMs better than humans, or at least the interpretability tools are now superior. Awkward place to be, but an interesting one.

A man, a dog and an instance of Claude.

The dog writes the prompts for Claude, the man feeds the dog, and the dog stops the man from turning off the computer.

I double checked and tested on AI Studio, since you can still access the previous model there:

>You should drive. >If you walk there, your car will stay behind, and you won't be able to wash it.

Thinking models consistently get it correct and did when the test was brand new (like a week or two ago). It is the opposite of surprising that a new thinking model continues getting it correct, unless the competitors had a time machine.

This kind of reflexive criticism isn't helpful, it's closer to a fully generalized counter-argument against LLM progress, whereas it's obvious to anyone that models today can do things they couldn't do six months ago, let alone 2 years back.

He also claimed that LLMs were a failure because of prompts that GPT 3.5 couldn't parse, after the launch of GPT-4,which handled them with aplomb.

https://nitter.net/AFpost/status/2017415163763429779?s=201

Something clearly went wrong in the process.

My sides

I'm not sure that claim is justified. The primary agentic use case today is code generation, and the target demographic is used to IDEs/code editors.

While that's probably a good chunk of total token usage, it's not representative of the average user's needs or desires. I strongly doubt that the chat interface would have become so ubiquitous if it didn't have merit.

Even for more general agentic use, a chat interface allows the user the convenience of typing or dictating messages. And it's trivially bundled with audio-to-audio or video-to-video, the former already being common.

I expect that even in the future, if/when richer modalities become standard (and the models can produce video in real-time), most people will be consuming their outputs as text. It's simply more convenient for most use-cases.

Of course, part of it was due to the fact that the out-of-the-box models became so competent that there was no need for a customized model, especially when customization boiled down to barely more than some kind of custom system prompt and hidden instructions. I get the impression that's the same reason their fine-tuning services never took off either, since it was easier to just load necessary information into the context window of a standard instance.

Edit: In all fairness, this was before most tool use, connectors or MCP. I am at least open to the idea that these might allow for a reasonable value add, but I'm still skeptical.

Why an iPad? Android tablets have been... not great for a long time. The pencil is very handy, and the ecosystem has the best apps. Also, I know a few rather handy tricks Safari can do, such as exporting entire webpages as PDF after a full-screen screenshot, that are very useful to my workflow.

2. I already own multiple general purpose computers. They're not as convenient as an iPad. My ridiculously powerful PC or even my decent laptop doesn't allow the same workflow. However, that's not an intentional software limitation, it's a consequence of their form factor, so I can't hold Microsoft to blame. On the other hand,Apple could easily make an iPad equivalent to a MacBook by getting out of the way.

3. The inability/difficulty of side-loading apps, the restriction to a locked down store. Refusing to make an interface that would allow for laptop-equivalent usage with an external/Bluetooth m+k. You can use an external monitor, but a 13" screen should already be perfectly good if window management and M+K usage wasn't subpar. Macs and iPads have near identical chips (the differences between an M chip for either are minor), and just being able to run MacOs apps on device would be very handy. Apple has allowed for developer opt-out emulation of iOS and iPadOS apps on Mac for a while now, why not the other way around?

If not obvious from the fact that I'm commenting on HN, I would gain utility from terminal access, the ability to compile and run apps on device, a better filesystem etc. Apple doesn't allow x86 emulators, nor can I just install Proton or Wine. If I can't side-load on a whim, it's not a general purpose computer. I can't use a browser that isn't just reskinned Safari, which rules out a great deal of obvious utility. There are a whole host of possible classes of apps, such as a torrent manager, which are allowed on other platforms but not on iPadOS. It's bullshit.

My pc and laptop simply aren't as convenient for the things I need an iPad for, and they can't be. On the other hand, my iPad could easily do many things I rely on a PC for, if Apple would get out of the way. iPadOS 26 is a step in the right direction, but there's dozens left to go.