this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
535 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
81803 readers
4184 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To clarify : model collapse is a hypothetical phenomenon that has only been observed in toy models under extreme circumstances. This is not related in any way to what is happening at OpenAI.
OpenAI made a bunch of choices in their product design which basically boil down to "what if we used a cheaper, dumber model to reply to you once in a while".
I mean, we're watching it happen. I don't think it's hypothetical anymore.
The funny thing is, in order to get it to the dumber model, they have to run people's queries through a model that selects the appropriate model first. This is resulted in new headaches for AI fans
Yeah that's also something that you have to train for, i'm not super aware of the technicals but model routing is definitely important to the AI companies. I suspect that's part of why they can pretend that "inference is profitable" as they are already trying to squeeze it down as much as possible.
I wonder if the routing is actually going to decrease the overall costs or increase them... Routing looks like it introduces new, unavoidable factors that would cause the costs to increase.
Yeah i remember that Ed article ! I don't think the technical aspects are relevant to the newer generation of models, but yeah of course any attempt to compress inference costs can have side effects : either response quality will degrade for using dumber models, or you'll have re-inference costs when the dumb model shits its pants. In fact the re-inference can become super costly as dumber models tend to get lost in reasoning loops more easily.