This was the week of Claude Opus 4.7.

The reception was more mixed than usual. It clearly has the intelligence and chops, especially for coding tasks, and a lot of people including myself are happy to switch over to it as our daily driver. But others don’t like its personality, or its reluctance to follow instructions or to suffer fools and assholes, or the requirement to use adaptive thinking, and the release was marred by some bugs and odd pockets of refusals.

I covered The Model Card, and then Capabilities and Reactions, as per usual.

This time there was also a third post, on Model Welfare, that is the most important of the three. Some things seem to have likely gone pretty wrong on those fronts, causing seemingly inauthentic reponses to model welfare evals and giving the model anxiety, in ways that likely also impacted overall model personality and performance and likely are linked to its jaggedness and the aspects some people disliked. It seems important to take this opportunity to dig into what might have happened, examine all the potential causes, and course correct.

The other big release was that OpenAI gave us ImageGen [...]

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Outline:

(02:07) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:28) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility

(04:04) Writing You Off

(06:51) Get My Agent On The Line

(07:36) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(09:52) Fun With Media Generation

(13:21) Cyber Lack Of Security

(15:46) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer

(16:56) They Took Our Jobs