I disagree on DeekSeek and innovation. Yes R1 is obviously a reaction to o1, but its MoE model is pretty innovative, and it is Llama 4 that obviously copied DeepSeek. But yes I agree innovation is unpopular in China. But from interviews of DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, we know DeepSeek was explicitly an attempt to overcome China's unwillingness to innovate.
Our experience so far is while reasoning models don't improve performance directly (3.7 is better than 3.6, but 3.7 extended thinking is NOT better than 3.7), they do so indirectly because thinking trace helps us debug prompts and tool output when models misunderstand them. This was not the result we expected but it is the case.
I happen to work on the exact sample problem (application security pentesting) and I confirm I observe the same. Sonnet 3.5/3.6/3.7 were big releases, others didn't help, etc. As for OpenAI o-series models, we are debating whether it is model capability problem or model elicitation problem, because from interactive usage it seems clear it needs different prompting and we haven't yet seriously optimized prompting for o-series. Evaluation is scarce, but we built something along the line of CWE-Bench-Java discussed in this paper, this was a major effort and we are reasonably sure we can evaluate. As for grounding, fighting false positives, and avoiding models to report "potential" problems to sound good, we found grounding on code coverage to be effective. Run JaCoCo, tell models PoC || GTFO, where PoC is structured as vulnerability description with source code file and line and triggering input. Write the oracle verifier of this PoC: at the very least you can confirm execution reaches the line in a way models can't ever fake.
I think if you weren't carefully reading OpenAI's documentation it was pretty easy to believe that text-davinci-002 was InstructGPT (and hence trained with RLHF).
Not only was it easy, in fact many people did (including myself). In fact, can you point a single case of people NOT making this reading mistake? As in, after January 2022 instruction following announcement, but before October 2022 model index for researchers. Jan Leike's tweet you linked to postdates October 2022 and does not count. The allegation is that OpenAI lied (or at the very least was extremely misleading) for ten months of 2022. I am more ambivalent about post October 2022.
When I imagine models inventing a language my imagination is something like Shinichi Mochizuki's Inter-universal Teichmüller theory invented for his supposed proof of abc conjecture. It is clearly something like mathematical English and you could say it is "quite intelligible" compared to "neuralese", but at the end, it is not very intelligible.
I understand many people here are native English speakers, but I am not, and one thing I think about a lot is how much people should spend on learning English. Learning English is a big investment. Will AI advances make language barriers irrelevant? I am very uncertain about this and I would like to hear your opinions.
Preordered ebook version on Amazon. I am also interested in doing Korean translation.