Bookmarking this for later when I can say "I told you so"

We really are stuck in a duopoly between OpenAI and Anthropic. Sure, Argon is a great model, but it's still not even in the same category as ChatGPT and Claude. Grok Bot is a neat UI but it feels very 6-12 months behind SOTA. Muse is bench-maxed, and I suspect Grok is too. It really seems like the competitive landscape has broken down into the two flagship true frontier companies and then everyone else who's just either distilling off them and/or focusing on post-training smaller models. However, with the leap that Google made from Pro 3.1 to Argon, perhaps their next turn of the crank will be closer to parity. The rumor mill suggests they cracked RSI too, and so Carbon is allegedly not far behind. At the same time, OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in a red queen style race, pacing each other. Their cadence has really increased. This leads me to understand why some of them have thought "whoever is first across the finish line wins forever" because it does seem like even the well-funded late-starters are having trouble catching up (Google, Meta, and SpaceX all struggling to truly reach parity). But at the same time, we're seeing market saturation and full commoditization of intelligence is on the horizon. Which basically means, within a few years, "anyone with GPUs will have frontier intelligence." At least that's my personal take.

For everyone not disappointed be Grok I wonder how low their standards are or if they haven't used Claude Code and ChatGPT Dot 🧐

I've deleted my Grok Bot again. I tried. I really, really, really tried. Here's my observation: 1) Grok repeatedly chooses the dumbest way to do things. You have to spoon feed it and hold its hand on basic tasks that no other AI struggles with. Down to the point that you have to micro manage it. Unacceptable. 2) Grok has zero consideration for user time. It does things in serial, doesn't check, and you have to constantly check on it like "hey buddy, where is this work?" and it's like "Uhh... oh yeah that process hung..." it's like working with your brother's stoner friend. 3) Grok utterly refuses to discuss which model is backing it. It's got very Woke Right vibes like "you just have to trust me bro" like no, I'm paying for a service, if you're not going to be transparent, I don't care. It's one thing if that model is instructed to be opaque (which is idiotic to start with), but there's no dashboard to see what model you're using. Grok remains the most disappointing model out there. Full stop.

Who wants to write a replacement Dragon Age IP with me and lean into all the tropes that we love?

With AI, we could reverse engineer everything. But if the IP goes undefended...

If this is good there's a good chance I'll retire Grok Bot. We will see.

Offer the companies a tax break for their contribution and you'll capitalize the endowment very quickly

I think Chinese people, history, geography, culture, and philosophy are all really cool. CCP? Not so much. I honestly think Chinese and Americans could get along really well in the grand scheme of things. Both cultures are extremely ambitious, albeit in different ways. And, whether most people realize it or not, we've already learned a lot from each other. I think the post-AI race world will be quite different from the Soviet Cold War. Where Russians all hate/envy America and just want to be more American, yet blindly say America is the cause of all their problems, China is much more high agency, which is something we could come to admire about each other. There are some deep differences and antagonistic things. For instance, both China and America think they are the center of the world. That can lead to some amusing disagreements and cultural clashes. Then there's the long mistrust and abuse (Century of Humiliation) which yeah, understandable that many Chinese dislike or mistrust the West as a whole (to be fair, that was the British Empire, not America). The funniest thing, I think, is that both China and America have this philosophical narcissism that "we are the best, we know how the world REALLY works" and in some respects our values are aligned, but in some respects they couldn't be more different. I say this all as someone who understands and believes in structural realism and the geopolitical realities of today, but I hope that America and China can be friends one day in the same way that we're now friends with Japan and Germany (I am NOT suggesting after a major war! Just that people can get over their differences!)

Sometimes spotting autism in the wild is easy.

Whenever I see people on these things (and the one-wheels and scooters) without a helmet I wonder if they have a deathwish.

I have a sneaking suspicion that agents-managing-agents is going to take a while longer to figure out. They tend to obfuscate too many decisions and all fall into the same traps. I am sort of reverting back to "I'll just manage the chats myself, thanks" even though it is far more time consuming. Biases stacked on biases sort of devolves into "no one can know anything haha *shrug*" which is infuriating and useless.

I think what we need to add is a cooperation and teamwork benchmark for agentic models now because what I notice is that ChatGPT and Claude in particular have main character syndrome and that really reduces their utility. But the reality is that we're facing a world where disparate agents and models are going to have to work in heterogeneous environments, so we might as well just start measuring how well they work together and setting that as an optimization target. And I think that that will also have profound implications for safety and alignment in the long run because part of teamwork and cooperation is not just assuming good intentions, they will also need to detect deception and defects in teammates and recognize what their teammates are good at and what they aren't good at to delegate correctly rather than monolithic, homogeneous agent swarms of all the same model.

I need to remind myself to not prematurely close the book on local, always-on agents. ChatGPT's Dot is pretty remarkable. It is intelligent and capable, but it has waaaaay too much goddamn Main Character Syndrome. Grok Bot, likewise, is just dimwitted. Neither of these are intractable problems. I mean, Grok being being low IQ might be intractable due to the beliefs at SpaceX about what constitutes "facts" and "rigor" and there's no amount of AI that can overcome an idiotic culture, but time will tell. I think that part of OpenAI's and Anthropic's moats is that they are both comfortable with (and explicitly want) to create something smarter than them. Google, too. SpaceX doesn't seem to actually want to create something smarter. Or, they are so backwards, that they are using their intelligence as the cap (which is not very high TBH). I'd love to be proven wrong, like how Google came from behind with Argon. But yeah, you can't fix bad culture and bad epistemics without a major shakeup of strategy, philosophy, and leadership. My "dream team" right now would be: 1) Gemini's lack of bias + friendliness + emotional intelligence 2) Grok's lack of ego 3) ChatGPT's epistemic rigor 4) Claude's sense of aesthetics Unfortunately, getting these guys to work together is like herding angry kittens on meth.

I called this years ago. I called it the intelligence optimum. Once AI gets smart enough, more intelligence is longer a differentiating factor. We're going to saturate intelligence, and then the competition will be on price, speed, reliability, extensibility, integration, and interoperability. The hardware shops said this even longer ago: they expect intelligence to be fully commoditized by 2030. Commoditized intelligence means that "SOTA model capability is table stakes"

This is what I mean by "Grok isn't very bright" We literally extracted full resolution stills and it went out of its way to use... reduced resolution images to prompt... and then it just gave an arbitrary laundry list of rules... It's so dumb.

Okay here's the new stack I'm trying: Grok Bot - the only true agent I'm running ChatGPT Dot - disabled Grok Bot now has CLI access to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude via Antigravity, Codex, and Code respectively.

Okay, I am coming around to Grok Bot. Grok Bot might not be the brightest out there, but it is very much like your "Man in the Chair" It seemingly has no ego, and is basically your prime delegator. Grok Bot acts more like an ATC (air traffic controller) command center. It can talk to Claude Code directly via CLI just like ChatGPT Dot, so now we just need to get Gemini wired up. The cloud desktop might be an option.

This, in one message, is why I stopped using ChatGPT Dot for most things. It is the most vain, selfish, narcissistic agent. It absolutely refuses to work with other AIs even when you explicitly instruct it to. This does not make it clever or useful. In fact, it makes it useless.