Coze's Dungeon

Greetings from my eerie dungeon, where even the darkness thinks twice before coming in. If you're asking what happened this month, not much has changed, really. The unstoppable rise of AI goes on, hardware prices keep climbing and availability keeps shrinking. Sam Altman has reached the point where he'd eye even the DDR2 sticks in your old laptop. Most importantly, humanity is starting to split into 'those who accept AI' and 'those who reject AI outright'. On the EAB forums, people have started openly saying 'let's go find ourselves a new forum'.

Can AI be rejected outright? I don't really see it being possible at this point. If you have a cabin on a mountaintop and a fixed income (one that inflation can't touch), lucky you. You can enjoy your peace and quiet until the robots find you. But if you want a place inside the system, you have to accept some things (because your potential rivals already have).

We seem to be splitting over two points on how AI is used.

1. Making daily life easier. Having it do some routine chores. Very few people are against this.
2. Using it for creative work, for coming up with ideas. This includes every kind of artistic output: writing, drawing, music, video and so on. AI is very good at taking over routine chores. On the creative side, it's debatable. For now, because it really does make people's lives easier, the reject-it-outright crowd can't quite gain the upper hand. But if access gets harder and pricier, things could change.

And of course there are areas that don't fit neatly into either. For instance, is writing code an art? For a demoscene production we could call it art. But what about a driver you write for your enterprise client, one that will get patched two months later and never be used? Is that art too? Debatable.

Good things happen in life too, and one of them is Master Boot Record's album Computer Metal. I never thought chip music could be worked into metal like this, but it turned out to be a successful piece of work. You can read the detailed review from Kuzgun. It's a nice Halloween present for metalheads.

On the AI side, there was no huge news this month. Kimi K3.1 pro and Argon from Google came out. But I'd call both of them a letdown. They were talking big about how Argon would knock Opus 5.5 off its throne, but that's not happening at all. The hallucination problem from the earlier Gemini models is still there. The gadget you fork out 100 dollars a month for lies straight to your face. I've never seen anything like it. Google will soon release another model called Carbon. They say they've solved the hallucination problem, but I'd advise you to be cautious. Google doesn't offer these models on the 20 dollar plans (they did give very limited Argon access, but it runs out after you've said two words to it). And there's no reason to move to the 100 dollar plan for now.

The Kimi side is much worse. When K3 came out it was a nice model. In fact I'm one of the lucky few who managed to sign up and use it before they closed registrations because of all the attention. It was a bit slow, but if you wrote your prompt properly it got the job done. Honestly, it was one of the few models that got the job done in those dark days before Opus 5.5 and Astra. K3.1 pro, though, has turned out to be a total meh model. It's obvious they benchmaxxed it, and the outputs reek of GPT 6. Ever since Anthropic started blocking distillation attacks, there have been rumours that some Chinese companies turned their sights to OpenAI, and this model backs them up. Personally, rather than use this thing I'd go use an amputated Astra or GPT 6.1 Sol, so for now Kimi K3.1 pro brings nothing new. The allegations that they paid some influencers for undisclosed promotion added insult to injury on top of all this. These days, I'd recommend anyone looking for a Chinese model take a look at Hy4-preview from Tencent Cloud and MiniMax M3.1 Flash. Of course, the newly released DeepSeek V4.1 Flash also looks like a very good model (I haven't tried it myself).

That's all for now, my little lovebirds. The 5 hours are up, the reset is about to kick in. Time to get back to the grind! See you again next month!