I clicked on the article to learn, "why Japanese companies do so many different things," and then got hit with pages of low-bitrate context, such that my eyes started glazing over and it was difficult to find the answer to the question. So I appreciate their compression, or at least pointing to where the answer is found.
Not only is that implication rude, it's just not true. I am at least in the 95th percentile of amount of reading. I just think the article is poorly written. Not everyone is a good writer these days (or any days).
Iran has no nuclear weapons. The administration simply wishes to prevent Israel from facing opponents that also have a nuclear deterrent (Israel has nuclear landmines, briefcases, missiles, and neutron bombs according to Sy Hersh). A deterrent would radically curb Israeli aggression and maybe even end the genocide in Gaza. There is little risk Iran would use a nuclear weapon. This is pure western aggression.
Sy Hersh hasn't been credible for a long time. We know Israel has a variety of nuclear weapons, but don't trust anything Hersh asserts without credible independent support.
How does an Iranian nuke curb Israeli aggression or change Israel's behaviour in Gaza? The vast majority of Israel's 'aggression' is against armed groups in neighbouring countries that Iran funds. If a country has a peace treaty with Israel and the monopoly on violence in their territory, they experience no Israeli aggression.
Iran can't credibly threaten to nuke Israel over a threat that isn't existential to Iran. And Hezbollah or Hamas being bombed (along with a lot of civilians) is is not that.
Why would you think returning to Obama's Iran deal would be a win? Actually, let me word this better: how could you possibly think that anyone in the White House for the past decade would think returning to Obama's Iran deal is better than this war?
The reason it's so incredible you could think such a thing is the White House has been saying how horrible that deal was in every interview for months, and of course intermittently for a decade.
"So a win will be returning to Obama’s Iran deal?"
Where in that long comment before yours did you see an implication that anyone was thinking a return to Obama's Iran deal was a win? Why did you use the word "so"?
They talked about Iran giving up its HEU, i.e. basically returning its uranium stocks to the Obama deal days when Iran agreed to even get rid of its modest quantity of medium enriched uranium.
Why are people so literal these days? The poster didn’t use a magic buzzword so no one can connect dots?
An no, I don’t actually think they’d consider returning to Obama’s deal would be a win because if I had to guess anything Obama did is the definition of bad in may peoples books.
So, to clarify, you were just trying to spread the meme that Iran giving up its HEU was equivalent or inferior to just holding to Obama's deal, in spite of your belief the commenter you were replying to would not agree with this, nor the instigators of this war?
Maybe don't troll. Or sealion. Or shill. Or propagandize. Not sure which of these is the best description, but it's one of them.
I'm sure you've at least heard what the United States' leaders have to say. To paraphrase Trump, "stopping nuclear proliferation to a group of lunatics that support terrorism". And also (still paraphrasing Trump), "the US doesn't need this as much as the rest of the world." So, perhaps this doesn't put the US ahead relative to other countries, but it puts them ahead of the counterfactual nuclear wasteland they could become.
Whether or not you believe the United States' leaders, whether or not you think there was a better way for them to achieve their goals (something something Obama deal) is up for debate. But it's very facetious to say you "can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war," when the United States' leaders have been publicly announcing it for nearly a year.
> Whether or not you believe the United States' leaders, whether or not you think there was a better way for them to achieve their goals (something something Obama deal) is up for debate. But it's very facetious to say you "can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war," when the United States' leaders have been publicly announcing it for nearly a year.
This comment doesn't make sense to me; if one doesn't agree with the US leaders then one can perfectly well say that one can't think of a single way in which the US has come out ahead. In fact that's just another way of saying that one doesn't agree with US leaders; there's no contradiction here.
The primary objective of the United States, at least according to their leaders, is suspiciously absent from their comment. If we're being charitable, it is clear they disagree with their leaders:
> All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.
But that deal also ended nearly a decade ago, and the United States has been in talks for more than a year to strike a new deal. It is facetious to say they gain nothing by starting a war, if your excuse is they could have just not blundered a decade ago. Unfortunately, the United States does not yet have access to time travel.
To clarify, in case that was not clear:
"Yes, the leaders say they gain something, but I disagree because they wouldn't have anything to gain if we could just go back in time and fix their blunders."
I think people's opinion of "marginal improvement" is based on their relative ability. A 2000 elo chess player is going to think the jump from 500 to 1000 is marginal. They're both floundering around not doing anything resembling common sense. A 1000 elo chess player is going to find the jump from 2000 to 2500 marginal. They're both playing far better moves for incomprehensible reasons, and the only reason you know the 2500 player is better is due to benchmarking. It is only when you are evaluating systems about at your level that you can feel the improvement.
I, personally, found the past two years to be a much larger improvement than the previous two years.
2024-2025 was filled with huge improvements. 2025-2026 has not been, outside of open source.
The idea that we’re at the point where it’s superseded our ability to tell just makes no sense. I’ll be happy if we can get to a point where I don’t have to tell Claude not to tail every bash command or make a job that writes throughout instead of once at the end. I’ll be happy if “continue this interaction naturally, you are taking over from an independent subagent” works.
But I’m not holding my breath. It’s still really cool that any of this stuff is possible.
Claude in feb of 2025 was barely able to code. Sure, it could write you a nice function, it could even write you a complex 200-line algorithm, but give it a codebase, and it would quickly get overwhelmed.
Claude in feb of 2026? Still far from perfect, but there's definitely a huge improvement here.
You're a good contributor - it's just all too easy for unintentional sharpness to downgrade the conversation, and when it's a good conversation like this one, that's especially regrettable.
The correct way to estimate this is exactly what people do. Measure the distance between ChatGPT's best public model and state of the art, the best humans. And there is very little difference between those versions from that perspective. It is very far away from peak human performance, and not getting noticeably closer for over a year now. There's lots of progress, but if you're OpenAI/Anthropic/Google, exactly the wrong kind of progress: the difference between ChatGPT 5.5 and a 27B/4B model (you need to try Gemma4-26B-A4B, wtf, it runs acceptably on CPU) is now reduced to ELO 1501 vs ELO 1434, generously a 70 ELO point difference, down from over 400, data from Arena.ai.
(in fact I find that Qwen-35B-A3B and Gemma4-26B-A4B very rarely "know" the answer, and so use first principles thinking, or go out and look for the answer where GPT-5.4 does not and simply assumes it knows. Which leads to now, in some cases, the small models far outperforming the big ones. Huge context + training quality seem to be the determining factors now, and neither of those are the strengths of SOTA models. If this continues ...)
While I agree this is a training problem, it is not a solvable one. ML models learn from examples. This is even true for their newest tricks like GRPO. They cannot train against things humans don't yet know.
And that's great, but you're forever locked at the peak of what you can be taught in widely available courses (which they download without paying) (even that is best case scenario: it assumes your ability to distinguish bullshit from reality somehow becomes perfect during training, or even before). The only way to exceed peak human performance is to start experimenting with math, physics, chemistry, even humans, yourself. And that has, even for humans, a massively higher cost than learning from examples, or from a course.
The reason they don't go further is the worst possible reason: the cost. It requires a 100x increase in training expense. Think of it like this: to exceed SOTA in physics or chemistry, training the next version of ChatGPT requires a particle accelerator, and a chemistry laboratory. This cannot be bypassed. Oh and not just any particle accelerator, right? A better one than the best currently existing one. Same for Chemistry labs. Same for ... So 100x is conservative.
But without doing it, ML models (LLM or otherwise) are forever limited at the level an army of first year university students achieve, ON AVERAGE. Maybe they can make that 2nd or even 4th year, at the end of the curve. But that's the limit. Phd level is the level you have to come up with new discoveries, and that ... just isn't possible with current training, even at the end of the improvement curve.
And ... is there budget to increase training cost another 100x? No ... there isn't. Not even with this totally absurd level of investment there isn't. And if small models keep this up, there's no way the investment is even remotely worth it.
You also can't make general policy based on exceptional circumstances. What you do is put exceptions to the general policy for exceptional circumstances.
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