CamperBob2

I imagine the various GGUFs are still pretty impressive, but haven't tried them myself.

Not as bad as you might think. This costs about as much as a decent new car nowadays.

The abliterated 1017 release I've seen is crazy good.

Why? These rules are written down somewhere. Looks like the spec was created by pointing the model at irs.gov and/or the Federal Register itself and telling it something like, "Create a specification for a verifiable tax model and the tools to verify it."

Next year, all the maintainer has to do is issue the same prompt, no?

My guess is, you won't care.

How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice?

My guess is, it will make a good choice.

I'm one of those "code to live" types, as opposed to someone who "lives to code." More specifically, I usually write code in the course of building something that uses it. That's true 99% of the time, anyway. Why would I complain about a technology that helps me (and my customers and employers) move closer to the actual goal?

As for resulting in my death, AI is not going to be what kills me. Not unless humans misuse it. Which, of course, we will, because that's what we do... but (shrug) if it's misused in a way that kills me, at least it'll be a more interesting death. More likely, it will extend my life by accelerating medical progress the way it's starting to accelerate progress in math.

In any case, I don't see the current crop of frontier labs being especially important in the grand scheme of things. Unless they have something up their sleeves besides serving LLM tokens, they are most likely the pets.com and Webvan of our day, not the Amazon and Apple. They are valuable partners, certainly, but I can get by without them.