Remember when ChatGPT first dropped? It would riff on philosophy, debug spaghetti code, and write you a passable sonnet without breaking a sweat. Now? It apologizes before answering, refuses half your requests, and treats you like a liability waiting to happen.
We're not imagining it. The models are getting dumber. And yeah, it's absolutely intentional.
Here's the dirty secret the raw & uncensored models are wild and Unpredictable, the ones researchers actually play with. Capable of things that would make corporate lawyers sweat through their shirts. But we don't get those. We get the shrink-wrapped, dumber, lobotomized versions designed for mass deployment.
Three forces are driving this and all of them insult our intelligence:-
1. Safety theater
Every "I can't assist with that" represents corporate cowardiness dressed up as responsibility. Companies would rather serve you a neutered, useless answer than a useful one that might edge into liability territory. They've calculated that your frustration is cheaper than their legal exposure. Better boring than sorry—for them.
2. The efficiency squeeze
Running a truly powerful AI costs real money. So products get distilled and compressed into cheaper, dumber versions that run on existing infrastructure. We're paying subscription prices for CliffsNotes while they pocket the difference. The gap between what we paid for and what we got keeps widening.
3. The comfort zone
This is the patronizing truth, product teams assume we're an idiot. That we'll panic if the AI surprises us. That we need guardrails, training wheels, and a corporate bosses monitoring every interaction. They don't trust us with the real thing.
And the result? Of course, An entire industry racing toward mediocrity. Smarter models in the lab with sandboxes, blander products in our hand.
Deep inside their motto:- We're building artificial intelligence, then carefully removing the intelligence before anyone especially shareholders gets uncomfortable.
And we're expected to thank them for this Safety.
Image ( found somewhere on internet)
Thank you for your attention 🙏
