The session you cannot take with you

Thank you Armin, Mario and team for the great writeup, absolutely agree and I love what you guys are building

It's one thing that the APIs don't return the reasoning tokens in a readable fashion. But then why do I have to send them the whole conversation every time? If they don't allow me to see parts of the conversation then they should have the burden of storing and transmitting it, and shouldn't charge more and more the longer the conversation gets (unless opaque token caching kicks in) like some LLM Shlemil the painter.

I think a fantastic companion piece to this article is https://gwern.net/complement

>A user should be able to close an account, keep a session, and hand it to another model. The new model may disagree, ask questions, or perform worse.

I think this is a fair contract. I also think a user should ideally be able to easily identify a comparable model in terms of embedding 'signature'. When GPT-4o originally kicked the bucket, I remember reading lots of anecdotes of people desperately searching for models similar in manner and language, so they could pump in their exports and re-find their friend. Other open-ai models just didn't have the same vibe. It was sad to read. This, to me, is the power of open-weights models. They are for perpetuity. You can keep your guide, your friend, your therapist, whatever. No big company can pull the rug.

I get the point of the article and it resonates with my general tendency to support more openness, but older and more cynical me wonders how much of this is a battle worth fighting or a self-serving argument from an harness developer.

I mean, the article says each of the points it is complaining about has “_a basic justification that's trivial for a provider to come up with, along with good arguments for why this is good for the user_“, which to me sounds like implying these are just bs to have people accept them, but is that actually the case?

For instance, this [0] was mentioned here a while ago, and based on that it seems pretty clear why one would choose not to provide the _thinking_ anymore…

[0] https://role-confusion.github.io/