Comment by erichocean
9 hours ago
I regularly have the opposite experience: o3 is almost unusable, and Gemini 2.5 Pro is reliably great. Claude Opus 4 is a close second.
o3 is so bad it makes me wonder if I'm being served a different model? My o3 responses are so truncated and simplified as to be useless. Maybe my problems aren't a good fit, but whatever it is: o3 output isn't useful.
I have this distinctive feeling that o3 tries to trick me intentionally when it can't solve a problem by cleverly hiding its mistakes. But I could be imagining it
It's certainly the "laziest" model, in the sense that it seems to be the likeliest to avoid doing the actual work and generate "TBD" stubs instead.
Are you using a tool other than ChatGPT? If so, check the full prompt that's being sent. It can sometimes kneecap the model.
Tools having slightly unsuitable built in prompts/context sometimes lead to the models saying weird stuff out of the blue, instead of it actually being a 'baked in' behavior of the model itself. Seen this happen for both Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3.
Are you using o3 on the official ChatGPT app or via API? I use it on the app and it performs very well, it's my go-to model for general purpose LLM use.
official ChatGPT app