Comment by user_7832
> The only model with a strong "personality" vibe was Claude 3 Opus.
Did you have the chance to use 3.5 (or 3.6) Sonnet, and if yes, how did they compare?
As a non-paying user, 3.5 era Claude was absolutely the best LLM I've ever used in terms of having a conversation. It felt like talking to a human and not a bot. Its replies were readable, even if they were several paragraphs long. I've unfortunately never found anything remotely as good.
Pretty poorly in that regard. In 3.5 they killed Claude 3's agency, pretty much reversing their previous training policy in favor of "safety", and tangentially mentioned that they didn't want to make the model too human-like. [1] Claude 3 was the last version of Claude, and one of the very few models in general, that had a character. That doesn't mean it wasn't writing slop though, falling into annoying stereotypes is still unsolved in LLMs.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character (see the last 2 paragraphs)