Patience too cheap to meter

Summary

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, famously said that his goal was to make intelligence “too cheap to meter”. Right now, buoyed by venture capital, we’re living in that world. Every human (with internet access) on the planet has free access to language models that are smart enough to assist with a wide variety of problems. And people are using it! ChatGPT has more traffic than Wikipedia. However, there doesn’t seem to be a huge consumer pressure towards smarter models. Claude Sonnet had a serious edge over ChatGPT for over a year, but only the most early-adopter of software engineers moved over to it. Most users are happy to just go to ChatGPT and talk to whatever’s available. Why is that? It could just be that people know about ChatGPT, and it takes a lot of marketing to get people to use a tool they don’t already know about. It could be that 4o is already “good enough”: depending on how cynical you are, either smart enough to do most ordinary tasks, or smart enough to be smarter than many of the people chatting with it. Or it could be that intelligence is not the main value most users are getting out of LLMs. Patience What is, then? I’ve thought for a while that the answer is patience. Consider this article by Julia Baird, where she describes how herself and other people are using ChatGPT for therapy: Dimity said she had been having “regular (intensely chaotic and cathartic) chats” with a version of therapy, ChatGPT, in order to “offload everything I don’t have time, money, or sometimes sanity to process elsewhere”. She said convenience is crucial: “Professional therapy isn’t super accessible for me, I’m prioritising my kids’ mental health needs, which means my own support has to be… well, free and available at 11:47pm when I’m feeling feelings and eating toast over the sink.” So I asked ChatGPT about it. And this damn robot was kind, empathetic, understanding and gentle. It told me, in short, to acknowledge the massive love I had for her, to have some compassion for myse...