Stupid question probably because I’ve gotten out of sync with the new releases but is Flash better or worse than vanilla 5.3? I’ve been using 5.3 extensively (and maybe ironically have used flash only for viewing images which I have as a skill in Pi because 5.3 vanilla seemingly doesn’t support vision). I find it generally competent but still very far behind opus 5.5. I’ve been trying to avoid Anthropic but the lift of opus vs GLM is enough that I end up coming back to it. I feel like currently there’s no comparison.

anyway, tldr I would not be happy if stuck with vanilla 5.3 so is flash better and should I move to that?

GLM 5.3 Flash is better if you need native multi-modal capabilities, higher speed, and lower costs, but worse than vanilla 5.3 in raw reasoning and for complex programming.

I get this is an unpopular opinion, but it’s even more important given the nature of the allegations. They “look bad” but it’s all accounting stuff in Cyprus, none of us know what’s actually legal here and what isn’t, it’s the BBC making insinuation about stuff to promote an investigative reports show or something they run.

I don’t want to defend anyone involved in the allegations, and don’t personally think they’re above shady business dealings, I just don’t like usual sensationalist “reporting” - essentially advertising like this and how people eat it up.

I feel like this isn’t the best way to draw attention to the problem. Presumably having the police visit is what the YouTuber wanted? I’m not really sure of the lesson here but drama’s presumably the point as opposed to a side effect so it’s hard to take seriously.

Can you explain your thinking?

Flock, at the core, isn't a public entity. They aren't a government. So they're a private entity, just like an individual, tracking who they want, when they want.

This person is doing the exact same thing as Flock, and suddenly it is a problem? Seems like a double-standard.

It should be mentioned that Flock is a YC company.

I like Dan G, Paul G, Gary T and all the lads but this is a fuck up. YC are supposed to be disruptive not borderline Stasi.

Biggest investors have always chosen the side of oppression. YC is no different than any other money lender. They will happily choose fascism over any kind of socialist wealth redistribution. Do not try to humanize an org that uses its wealth as a leverage to gain more wealth.

How many police have visited flock executives to ask them why they're doing what they're doing?

You feel that greater attention is typically paid online to undramatic things?

I hate that too, but I think it’s more the ux than the concept of a default. There are definitely situations (“here’s the default install path, press enter to confirm”) where defaults are a good experience, and LLM generated ones can fall in this category.

What I hate about sentence completion or suggestion is usually that it happens right when I’m trying to think and so destroys my focus, it’s actually way worse than just a passive option, it’s actively harmful to the task I want. The worst is google docs “help me write” - that may be gone now, I’ve blocked it with ublock origin, that waits until you’re thinking amount what you’d write and then hits you with a distracting pop up. It’s obviously PMs that don’t care about their users and want to maximize some AI use metric.

Anyway rant aside, it’s the interface more than the concept that’s the big problem.

Agreed, I find the cognitive load of checking the suggestion much higher than just writing my own message.

Softmax over logits doesn’t give calibrated probabilities either as a rule. I don’t want to comment specifically on Jev but as a rule it’s very hard to get good calibration because it’s somewhat in tension with minimizing training loss for neural networks, e.g. Guo et al (2017) https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04599

While I know there are ways to improve calibration, I’d personally want to see a lot of evidence the probabilities were actually more meaningful before trusting them. I agree of course that asking an LLM to provide a confidence estimate is meaningless.

So nothing to do with AI, their anonymization scheme seems to be flawed and somebody figured that out. But AI is a better scapegoat than whoever designed the system

I can think of at least one other pretty good reason, which is in anticipation of regulatory capture. If "LLM used must be FOOBAR-certified" and coincidentally no Chinese models can get this certification, having such an alternative is a lot more valuable than just scoring highest in a set of benchmarks. Not to mention that these benchmarks aren't always accurate.

Not really. The upside of competitive newer models is all in the proprietary data they are trained on. This is why data labeling, RL environments et al have been such a big industry, OpenAI and Antrhopic are paying literally billions to get the data they need. Do people think the ability to do research level math or advanced cybersec comes from just training on more public data?

A real sovereign effort could invest heavily in this, whatever people accuse China of “stealing” I’m sure they are also generating tons of their own data and are probably the primary sovereign doing so outside the US labs.

Yeah I think a model has to be actually good to claim sovereignty, as in competitive enough that people want to use it. Chinese and US LLMs are the only ones in these categories right now. Mistral and Cohere have the same problem, yes they are made in different countries but they are not competitive. They (France and Canada in this case) would be better off just downloading Chinese LLMs, even if they get cut off they still have the weights.

I’m most familiar with Canada, where sovereign is usually just an excuse to overpay someone connected for an inferior product with no strategic value.

We have to start somewhere. And I am not sure that you understand what the word sovereign means since it’s entirely disconnected from how “good” something is.

Mistral's medium is absolutely good enough to help with a ton of coding tasks. I've personally used it and found it very helpful. If hypothetically the US cut off the rest of the world from their models Mistral would be a very useful model to continue to use.

Also, it's not like it's fixed in time, they are continually building more powerful models as well. Simply because you're in second place doesn't mean you quit the journey. Though, I'm sure the US has a huge vested interest of convincing people to "just quit and submit."

No. Thanks.

> they are literally trying to build a superpower that exceeds the impact of the atomic bomb

I think people (the government, powers that be) have given away what they really think by their actions. There are few that take this seriously. The “exceeds the impact of the internet” view has much more support based on investment, but the “danger” aspect does not based on actions. If this was a company making novel prions or whatever that were outside regulation but obviously dangerous, government would be all over them. What regulation we do see is much more power grab than mitigating real danger

The government is all over them. The President of the United States had dinner with one AI CEO yesterday and is having lunch with a group of them tomorrow. The Senate is having a hearing called "Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks" on Wednesday.