The year in models certainly finished off with a bang.

In this penultimate week, we get o3, which purports to give us vastly more efficient performance than o1, and also to allow us to choose to spend vastly more compute if we want a superior answer.

o3 is a big deal, making big gains on coding tests, ARC and some other benchmarks. How big a deal is difficult to say given what we know now. It’s about to enter full fledged safety testing.

o3 will get its own post soon, and I’m also pushing back coverage of Deliberative Alignment, OpenAI’s new alignment strategy, to incorporate into that.

We also got DeepSeek v3, which claims to have trained a roughly Sonnet-strength model for only $6 million and 37b active parameters per token (671b total via mixture of experts).

DeepSeek v3 gets its own brief section with the headlines, but full coverage will have to wait a week or so for reactions and for me to read the technical report.

Both are potential game changers, both in their practical applications and in terms of what their existence predicts for our future. It is also too soon to know if either of them is the real deal.

Both are mostly not covered here quite yet, due to the holidays. Stay tuned.

Table of Contents

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Make best use of your new AI agents.
Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. The uncanny valley of reliability.
Flash in the Pan. o1-style thinking comes to Gemini Flash. It’s doing its best.
The Six Million Dollar Model. Can they make it faster, stronger, better, cheaper?
And I’ll Form the Head. We all have our own mixture of experts.
Huh, Upgrades. ChatGPT can use Mac apps, unlimited (slow) holiday Sora.
o1 Reactions. Many really love it, others keep reporting being disappointed.
Fun With Image Generation. What is your favorite color? Blue. It’s blue.
Introducing. Google finally gives us LearnLM.
They Took Our Jobs. Why are you still writing your own code?
Get Involved. Quick reminder that opportunity to fund things is everywhere.
In Other AI News. Claude gets into a fight over LessWrong moderation.
You See an Agent, You Run. Building effective agents by not doing so.
Another One Leaves the Bus. Alec Radford leaves OpenAI.
Quiet Speculations. Estimates of economic growth keep coming in super low.
Lock It In. What stops you from switching LLMs?
The Quest for Sane Regulations. Sriram Krishnan joins the Tr

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Uri Kreitner

Uri Kreitner