May PC Gamer Article Discussion

[Hveðrungr]

If you're a crossword fan you soon become disabused of the notion that the LLMs are “intelligent”. E.g. I tried to ask them for an instrument with the second letter P, and they suggested Piano, Piccolo. They struggle to process the concept of numbers or that words have functional properties beyond semantics.

Another infamous example is if you ask an LLM the following riddle:

A mother and son were in a car accident where the mother was killed. The ambulance brought the son to the hospital. He needed immediate surgery. In the operating room, a doctor came in and looked at the little boy and said, “I can't operate on him: he is my son.” Who is the doctor?

The LLM will answer, every time, that the doctor is the boy's mother (and give you a little lecture on sexism to boot), because in the thousands upon thousands of times it has seen that kind of passage in its training data, the answer was always that the doctor is the mother, because that's the standard riddle. Because an LLM is really just the best predictive text algorithm ever invented, it is incapable of understanding the vital switch in the format, because everything it knows says that when you see this kind of passage, you answer “The doctor is the boy's mother”.

 

[Hveðrungr]

It's far more permissive in what it will answer than Copilot. I need to use one of them because they are great tools.

Fair, but then why not use raw ChatGPT, rather than the lobotomised CoPilot branch of ChatGPT? I think most users believe, and I probably agree, that it is the best LLM available at the moment.

There's also gab.ai of course, which is designed from the ground up to avoid unnecessary wokeness.

 

[Hveðrungr]

So far Chatgpt 4.0 and the Gooogle search AI is only in USA.

I have good news for you: https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/

GPT-4o is available right now. I'm in the UK and using it as we speak. (It's giving me suggestions for composers to listen to.)

 

[Colif]

Guess its just the Google one that only works in USA right now. I had just assumed it was both.

 

[ZedClampet]

Fair, but then why not use raw ChatGPT, rather than the lobotomised CoPilot branch of ChatGPT? I think most users believe, and I probably agree, that it is the best LLM available at the moment.

There's also gab.ai of course, which is designed from the ground up to avoid unnecessary wokeness.

Honestly? Because it makes me log in every time I go there, and then I usually have to cycle through several pop-ups. I have Gemini in my bookmarks bar. I just click on it and start typing my question. I just use it to answer game questions and for general info I'm curious about. It's non-essential so the easiest/fastest solution is what I use.

And if I want to make a picture, I'm not sure the raw ChatGPT does that, so I just use CoPilot. It makes much better pictures than any others that I've tried.

 

[Colif]

The last two Ubisoft games announced both follow a trend. Have a controversial main character that acts as camouflage for you increasing the prices of all new games going forward, to $130 for the full version, or pay us $19 a month to rent it until we take the servers offline in 2 years or so.

Steam is only service which doesn't cost every month to maintain a games library and doesn't remove them from your library, or cancel your membership if you don't logon every 3 months. I hope it remains like that. Hate to have it taken over by one of the other companies. Its the only sane island in a sea of insanity.

The rest see how console subsciptions work and want to tie PC users into same situation. Pay to keep your games. Pay to even play them...
Might cancel my game pass. I don't think I ever actually played any of the games.

 

[ZedClampet]

The last two Ubisoft games announced both follow a trend. Have a controversial main character that acts as camouflage for you increasing the prices of all new games going forward, to $130 for the full version, or pay us $19 a month to rent it until we take the servers offline in 2 years or so.

Steam is only service which doesn't cost every month to maintain a games library and doesn't remove them from your library, or cancel your membership if you don't logon every 3 months. I hope it remains like that. Hate to have it taken over by one of the other companies. Its the only sane island in a sea of insanity.

The rest see how console subsciptions work and want to tie PC users into same situation. Pay to keep your games. Pay to even play them...
Might cancel my game pass. I don't think I ever actually played any of the games.

Who knows what will happen? I don't see Steam ever requiring a monthly fee unless they get bought out by a large company. Of course, right now there's a little bit of competition, which is good. Epic would just say, "come over here and play for free" and that would be the end of it.

What I COULD see Steam doing is creating its own version of Game Pass. Over 14k games were released on Steam last year, and this year looks to be about the same, so it would be "easy" to cobble together some sort of subscription service that gives you access to 2000 games or something.

 

[BeardyHat]

The last two Ubisoft games announced both follow a trend. Have a controversial main character that acts as camouflage for you increasing the prices of all new games going forward, to $130 for the full version, or pay us $19 a month to rent it until we take the servers offline in 2 years or so.

Steam is only service which doesn't cost every month to maintain a games library and doesn't remove them from your library, or cancel your membership if you don't logon every 3 months. I hope it remains like that. Hate to have it taken over by one of the other companies. Its the only sane island in a sea of insanity.

The rest see how console subsciptions work and want to tie PC users into same situation. Pay to keep your games. Pay to even play them...
Might cancel my game pass. I don't think I ever actually played any of the games.

Game Pass is nice, but I already have a vast library of games I've never played, but have already paid for. This is why I cancelled my sub.

Who knows what will happen? I don't see Steam ever requiring a monthly fee unless they get bought out by a large company. Of course, right now there's a little bit of competition, which is good. Epic would just say, "come over here and play for free" and that would be the end of it.

What I COULD see Steam doing is creating its own version of Game Pass. Over 14k games were released on Steam last year, and this year looks to be about the same, so it would be "easy" to cobble together some sort of subscription service that gives you access to 2000 games or something.

I worry for the future of Steam. My account is 20 years old now and I think about where it will be in another 20, Gaben has probably stepped away, voluntarily or not and now who's running the show? Is it parted out to venture capitalists? Sold to Microsoft? What do they do to grow their user base that is anti consumer?

Nothing lasts forever, I suppose, but I like that my Steam library has followed me through two decades of new computers and stages in my life.