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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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You're getting downvoted but it's true. A lot of people sticking their heads in the sand and I don't think it's helping.
Yeah, "AI is getting pretty good" is a very unpopular opinion in these parts. Popularity doesn't change the results though.
Its unpopular because its wrong.
It's overhyped in many areas, but it is undeniably improving. The real question is: will it "snowball" by improving itself in a positive feedback loop? If it does, how much snow covered slope is in front of it for it to roll down?
I think its far more likely to degrade itself in a feedback loop.
It's already happening. GPT 5.2 is noticeably worse than previous versions.
It's called model collapse.
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 feel that a lot of what is improving in the recent batch of model releases is the vetting of their training data - basically the opposite of model collapse.
Nothing requires an LLM to train on the entire internet.
I mean, we're watching it happen. I don't think it's hypothetical anymore.
I'm sorry but no, models are definitely not collapsing. They still have a million issues and are subject to a variety of local optima, but they are not collapsing in any way. It is not known whether this can even happen in large models, and if it can it would require months of active effort to generate the toxic data and fine-tune models on that data. Nobody is gonna spend that kind of money to shoot themselves in the foot.
Then why are newer versions of the major models performing so poorly? For instance, GPT 5.2 is definitely not an improvement over 4.5. What's the root cause?
The switch you mention (from 4th gen to 5th gen GPT) is when they introduced the model router, which created a lot of friction. Basically this will try to answer your question with as cheap a model as possible, so most of the time you won't be using flagship 5.2 but a 5.2-mini or 5.2-tiny which are seriously dumber. This is done to save money of course, and the only way to guarantee pure 5.2 usage is to go through the API where you pay for every token.
There's also a ton of affect and personal bias. Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating others intelligence, and this is especially true of chatbots which try to mimic specific personalities that may or may not mesh well with your own. For example, OpenAI's signature "salesman & bootlicker" personality is grating to me and i consistently think it's stupider than it is. I've even done a bit of double blind evaluation on various cognitive tasks to confirm my impression but the data really didn't agree with me. It's smart, roughly as smart as other models of its generation, but it's just fucking insufferable. It's like i see Sam Altman's shit eating grin each time i read a word from ChatGPT, that's why i stopped using it. That's a property of me, the human, not GPT, the machine.
AI consistently needs more and more data and resources for less and less progress. Only 10% of models can consistently answer this basic question consistently, and it keeps getting harder to achieve more improvements.
42 out of 53 models said to walk to the carwash.
And yet the best models outdid humans at this "car wash test." Humans got it right only 71.5% of the time.