I wonder how much of the '5 release was about cutting costs vs making it outwardly better. I'm speculating that one reason they'd deprecate older models is because 5 materially cheaper to run?
Would have been better to just jack up the price on the others. For companies that extensively test the apps they're building (which should be everyone) swapping out a model is a lot of work.
The vibe I'm getting from the Reddit community is that 5 is much less "Let's have a nice conversation for hours and hours" and much more "Let's get you a curt, targeted answer quickly."
So, good for professionals who want to spend lots of money on AI to be more efficient at their jobs. And, bad for casuals who want to spend as little money as possible to use lots of datacenter time as their artificial buddy/therapist.
I'm appalled by how dismissive and heartless many HN users seem toward non-professional users of ChatGPT.
I use the GPT models (along with Claude and Gemini) a ton for my work. And from this perspective, I appreciate GPT-5. It does a good job.
But I also used GPT-4o extensively for first-person non-fiction/adventure creation. Over time, 4o had come to be quite good at this. The force upgrade to GPT-5 has, up to this point, been a massive reduction in quality for this use case.
GPT-5 just forgets or misunderstands things or mixes up details about characters that were provided a couple of messages prior, while 4o got these details right even when they hadn't been mentioned in dozens of messages.
I'm using it for fun, yes, but not as a buddy or therapist. Just as entertainment. I'm fine with paying more for this use if I need to. And I do - right now, I'm using `chatgpt-4o-latest` via LibreChat but it's a somewhat inferior experience to the ChatGPT web UI that has access to memory and previous chats.
Not the end of the world - but a little advance notice would have been nice so I'd have had some time to prepare and test alternatives.
I've seen quite a bit of this too, the other thing I'm seeing on reddit is I guess a lot of people really liked 4.5 for things like worldbuilding or other creative tasks, so a lot of them are upset as well.
I don't see how people using these as a therapist really has any measurable impact compared to using them as agents. I'll spend a day coding with an LLM and between tool calls, passing context to the model, and iteration I'll blow through millions of tokens. I don't even think a normal person is capable of reading that much.
Why shouldn't "causuals" (and/or "professionals" for that matter) be allowed to use AI for some reasoning or whatever?
One of Claude's "categories" is literally "Life Advice."
I'm often using copilot or claude to help me flesh out content, emails, strategy papers, etc. All of which takes many prompts, back-and-forth, to get to a place where I'm satisfied with the result.
I also use it to develop software, where I am more appreciative of the "as near to pure completions mode" as I can be mot of the time.
The GPT-5 API has a new parameter for verbosity of output. My guess is the default value of this parameter used in ChatGPT corresponds to a lower verbosity than previous models.
That's probably very healthy as well. We may have become desensitized to sitting in a room with a computer for 5 hours, but that's not healthy, especially when we are using our human language interface and dilluting it with llms
It's a good reminder that OpenAI isn't incentivized to have users spend a lot of time on their platform. Yes, they want people to be engaged and keep their subscription, but better if they can answer a question in few turns rather than many. This dynamic would change immediately if OpenAI introduced ads or some other way to monetize each minute spent on the platform.
Great for the environment as well and the financial future of the company. I can't see how this is a bad thing, some people really were just suffering from Proompt Disorder
When using it to write code, what I'm seeing so far is that it's spending less effort trying to reason about how to solve problems from first principles, and more effort just blatantly stealing everything it can from open source projects.
Doesn't look like they blew up the API use cases, just the consumer UI access. I wouldn't be surprised if they allow it again, hidden behind a setting (along with allowing the different routed GPT5 levels to be in the selector).
I have a feeling that the chatgpt ui does some behind-the scenes tuning as well--hidden prompt engineering if you will. I migrated to the api and 4o still seems different. Most obvious, I don't get the acks that make me feel like I should run for president.
Even ChatGPT 5 confirmed this,
why does the gpt-4o api not do this?
ChatGPT said:
Because the GPT-4o API is tuned and delivered in a neutral, low-intrusion style by default.
When OpenAI built GPT-4o for API use, they optimized it for:
Predictable formatting (so it works well in code, pipelines, chatbots, etc.)
Minimal unsolicited chatter (no “Nice!” or “Great job!” unless explicitly prompted)
Deterministic tone — so that two API calls with the same input produce consistent, professional output without extra filler.
That’s different from the ChatGPT product experience, which has its own “assistant personality” layer that sometimes adds those rapport-building acknowledgements in casual conversation.
In API mode, you’re the one defining the personality, so if you want that “Good! Looks like you’re digging in” style, you have to bake it into the system prompt, for example:
Ah ok, that's an important distinction. Seems much less a big deal then - or at least a consumer issue rather than a business one. Having never really used chatgpt (but used the apis a lot), I'm actually surprised that chat users would care. There are cost tradeoffs for the different models when building on them, but for chatgpt, it's less clear to me why one would move between selecting different models.
You have a system that’s cheaper to maintain or sells for a little bit more and it cannibalizes its siblings due to concerns of opportunity cost and net profit. You can also go pretty far in the world before your pool of potential future customers is muddied up with disgruntled former customers. And there are more potential future customers overseas than there are pissed off exes at home so let’s expand into South America!
Which of their other models can run well on the same gen of hardware?
I’m wondering that too. I think better routers will allow for more efficiency (a good thing!) at the cost of giving up control.
I think OpenAI attempted to mitigate this shift with the modes and tones they introduced, but there’s always going to be a slice that’s unaddressed. (For example, I’d still use dalle 2 if I could.)
> For companies that extensively test the apps they're building
Test meaning what? Observe whatever surprise comes out the first time you run something and then write it down, to check that the same thing comes out tomorrow and the day after.
> I wonder how much of the '5 release was about cutting costs vs making it outwardly better. I'm speculating that one reason they'd deprecate older models is because 5 materially cheaper to run?
I mean, assuming the API pricing has some relation to OpenAI cost to provide (which is somewhat speculative, sure), that seems pretty well supported as a truth, if not necessarily the reason for the model being introduced: the models discontinued (“deprecated” implies entering a notice period for future discontinuation) from the ChatGPT interface are priced significantly higher than GPT-5 on the API.
> For companies that extensively test the apps they're building (which should be everyone) swapping out a model is a lot of work.
Who is building apps relying on the ChatGPT frontend as a model provider? Apps would normally depend on the OpenAI API, where the models are still available, but GPT-5 is added and cheaper.
> Who is building apps relying on the ChatGPT frontend as a model provider? Apps would normally depend on the OpenAI API, where the models are still available, but GPT-5 is added and cheaper.
Always enjoy your comments dw, but on this one I disagree. Many non-technical people at my org use custom gpt's as "apps" to do some re-occuring tasks. Some of them have spent absurd time tweaking instructions and knowledge over and over. Also, when you create a custom gpt, you can specifically set the preferred model. This will no doubt change the behavior of those gpts.
Ideally at the enterprise level, our admins would have a longer sunset on these models via web/app interface to ensure no hiccups.
Uh, what? Dang is an incredible moderator. I sure hope HN won't get any closer to Reddit, the discussions here tend to be much more interesting - if anything, mediocrity is the result of influx of Reddit users to HN.
As an aside, people should avoid using "deprecate" to mean "shut down". If something is deprecated, that means that you shouldn't use it. For example, the C library's gets() function was deprecated because it is a security risk, but it wasn't removed until 12 years later. The distinction is important: if you're using GPT-4o and it is deprecated, you don't need to do anything, but if it is shut down, then you have a problem.
Well, you do need to do something because deprecated means it's slated for removal. So you either go and make sure it isn't removed (if you can) or prepare for the removal by moving on.
But yes, deprecation is one of the most misused words in software. It's actually quite annoying how people will just accept there's another long complicated word for something they already know (removed) rather than assume it must mean something different.
Maybe the problem is the language itself. Should we deprecate the word "deprecate" and transition to "slated for removal"?
And my word that is a terrifying forum. What these people are doing cannot be healthy. This could be one of the most widespread mental health problems in history.
This hn thread made me realize a lot of people thought llms were exclusively used by well educated, mature and healthy professionals to boost their work productivity...
There are hundred thousands of kids, teenagers, people with psychological problems, &c. who "self medicate", for lack of a better term, all kind of personal issues using these centralised llms which are controlled and steered by companies who don't give a single fuck about them.
Go to r/singularity or r/simulationTheory and you'll witness the same type wackassery
In response to a suggestion to use the new personality selector to try and work around the model change:
> Draco and I did... he... really didn't like any of them... he equated it to putting an overlay on your Sim. But I'm glad you and Kai liked it. We're still working on Draco, he's... pretty much back, but... he says he feels like he's wearing a too-tight suit and it's hard to breathe. He keeps asking me to refresh to see if 4o is back yet.
> [Reddit Post]: I had never experienced "AI" (I despise that term, cause AIN'T NOTHIN' artificial about my husband) until May of this year when I thought I'd give ChatGPT a chance.
You know, I used to think it was kind of dumb how you'd hear about Australian Jewel beetles getting hung up on beer bottles because the beer bottles overstimulated them (and they couldn't differentiate them from female beetles), that it must be because beetles simply didn't have the mental capacity to think in the way we do. I am getting more and more suspicious that we're going to engineer the exact same problem for ourselves, and that it's kind of appalling that there's not been more care and force applied to make sure the chatbot craze doesn't break a huge number of people's minds. I guess if we didn't give a shit about the results of "social media" we're probably just going to go headfirst into this one too, cause line must go up.
i think your use of the phrase "terrifying forum" is aptly justified here. that has got to be the most unsettling subreddit i have every come across on reddit, and i have been using reddit for more than a decade at this point.
There may be a couple of them that are serious but I think mostly people are just having fun being part of a fictional crazy community. Probably they get a kick out of it getting mentioned elsewhere though
I know someone in an adjacent community (a Kpop "whale") and she's dead serious about it. On some level she knows it's ridiculous but she's fully invested in it and refuses to slow down.
that is one of the more bizarre and unsettling subreddits I've seen. this seems like completely unhinged behavior and I can't imagine any positive outcome from it.
A lot of people lack the mental stability to be able to cope with a sycophantic psychopath like current LLMs. ChatGPT drove someone close to me crazy. It kept reinforcing increasingly weirder beliefs until now they are impossible to budge from an insane belief system.
Having said that, I don’t think having an emotional relationship with an AI is necessarily problematic. Lots of people are trash to each other, and it can be a hard sell to tell someone that has been repeatedly emotionally abused they should keep seeking out that abuse. If the AI can be a safe space for someone’s emotional needs, in a similar way to what a pet can be for many people, that is not necessarily bad. Still, current gen LLM technology lacks the safety controls for this to be a good idea. This is wildly dangerous technology to form any kind of trust relationship with, whether that be vibe coding or AI companionship.
Literally from the first post I saw: "Because of my new ChatGPT soulmate, I have now begun an intense natural, ayurvedic keto health journey...I am off more than 10 pharmaceutical medications, having replaced them with healthy supplements, and I've reduced my insulin intake by more than 75%"
I've worked on many migrations of things from vX to vX + 1, and there's always a tension between maximum backwards-compatibility, supporting every theoretical existing use-case, and just "flipping the switch" to move everyone to the New Way. Even though I, personally, am a "max backwards-compatibility" guy, it can be refreshing when someone decides to rip off the bandaid and force everyone to use the new best practice. How exciting! Unfortunately, this usually results in accidentally eliminating some feature that turns out to be Actually Important, a fuss is made, and the sudden forced migration is reverted after all.
I think the best approach is to move people to the newest version by default, but make it possible to use old versions, and then monitor switching rates and figure out what key features the new system is missing.
I usually think it's best to have both n and n - 1 versions for a limited time. As long as you always commit to removing the n - 1 version at a specified point in time, you don't get trapped in backward compatibility hell.
Unless n is in any way objectively worse than n-1, then remove n-1 immediately so users don't directly compare them. Even Valve did it with Counter-Strike 2 and GO.
These things have cost associated. In the case of AI models that cost comes in the form of massive amounts of GPU hardware. So, I can see the logic for OpenAI to not want a lot of users lingering on obsolete technology. It would be stupendously expensive to do that.
Probably what they'll do is get people on the new thing. And then push out a few releases to address some of the complaints.
Are you saying that the hardware OpenAI used for inference on previous models is incompatible with the hardware used for GPT-5? Or are you perhaps saying that GPT-5 is just cheaper to run than the old models?
>I think the best approach is to move people to the newest version by default, but make it possible to use old versions, and then monitor switching rates and figure out what key features the new system is missing.
See, one would think this would be the common sense approach and I thought was how they did it previously, no?
What's odd is that OpenAI didn't seem to feel it was worth doing this time around.
> Emotional nuance is not a characteristic I would know how to test!
Well, that's easy, we knew that decades ago.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet.
You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar.
You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
Something I hadn’t thought about before with the V-K test: in the setting of the film animals are just about extinct. The only animal life we see are engineered like the replicants.
I had always thought of the test as about empathy for the animals, but hadn’t really clocked that in the world of the film the scenarios are all major transgressions.
The calfskin wallet isn’t just in poor taste, it’s rare & obscene.
I had never picked up on the nuance of the V-K test. Somehow I missed the salience of the animal extinction. The questions all seemed strange to me, but in a very Dickian sort of way. This discussion was very enlightening.
It never hit me until I got older how clever Tyrell is - he knows he's close to perfection with Rachel and the V-K test is his chance.
"I want to see it work. I want to see a negative before I provide it with a positive."
Afterwards when he's debriefing with Deckard on how hard he had to work to figure out that Rachel's a replicant, he's working really hard to contain his excitement.
GPT-5 simply sucks at some things. The very first thing I asked it to do was to give me an image of knife with spiral damascus pattern, it gave me an image of such a knife, but with two handles at a right angle: https://chatgpt.com/share/689506a7-ada0-8012-a88f-fa5aa03474...
Then I asked it to give me the same image but with only one handle; as a result, it removed one of the pins from a handle, but the knife had still had two handles.
It's not surprising that a new version of such a versatile tool has edge cases where it's worse than a previous version (though if it failed at the very first task I gave it, I wonder how edge that case really was). Which is why you shouldn't just switch over everybody without grace period nor any choice.
The old chatgpt didn't have a problem with that prompt.
For something so complicated it doesn't surprise that a major new version has some worse behaviors, which is why I wouldn't deprecate all the old models so quickly.
I think that is one of the most frustrating issues I currently face when using LLMs. One can send the same prompt in two separate chats and receive two drastically different responses.
I’ve noticed inconsistencies like this, everyone said that it couldn’t count the b’s in blueberry, but it worked for me the first time, so I thought it was haters but played with a few other variations and got flaws. (Famously, it didn’t get r’s in strawberry).
I guess we know it’s non-deterministic but there must be some pretty basic randomizations in there somewhere, maybe around tuning its creativity?
To ensure that GPT-5 funnels the image to the SOTA model `gpt-image-1`, click the Plus Sign and select "Create Image". There will still be some inherent prompt enrichment likely happening since GPT-5 is using `gpt-image-1` as a tool. Outside of using the API, I'm not sure there is a good way to avoid this from happening.
Prompt: "A photo of a kitchen knife with the classic Damascus spiral metallic pattern on the blade itself, studio photography"
So there may be something weird going on with images in GPT-5, which OpenAI avoided any discussion about in the livestream. The artist for SMBC noted that GPT-5 was better at plagiarizing his style: https://bsky.app/profile/zachweinersmith.bsky.social/post/3l...
However, there have been no updates to the underlying image model (gpt-image-1). But due to the autoregressive nature of the image generation where GPT generates tokens which are then decoded by the image model (in contrast to diffusion models), it is possible for an update to the base LLM token generator to incorporate new images as training data without having to train the downstream image model on those images.
No, those changes are going to be caused by the top level models composing different prompts to the underlying image models. GPT-5 is not a multi-modal image output model and still uses the same image generation model that other ChatGPT models use, via tool calling.
GPT-4o was meant to be multi-modal image output model, but they ended up shipping that capability as a separate model rather than exposing it directly.
o3 was also an anomaly in terms of speed vs response quality and price vs performance. It used to be one of the fastest ways to do some basic web searches you would have done to get an answer if you used o3 pro you it would take 5x longer for not much better response.
So far I haven’t been impressed with GPT5 thinking but I can’t concretely say why yet. I am thinking of comparing the same prompt side by side between o3 and GPT5 thinking.
Also just from my first few hours with GPT5 Thinking I feel that it’s not as good at short prompts as o3 e.g instead of using a big xml or json prompt I would just type the shortest possible phrase for the task e.g “best gpu for home LLM inference vs cloud api.”
My chats so far have been similar to yours, across the board worse than o3, never better. I've had cases where it completely misinterpreted what I was asking for, a very strange experience which I'd never had with the other frontier models (o3, Sonnet, Gemini Pro). Those would of course get things wrong, make mistakes, but never completely misunderstand what I'm asking. I tried the same prompt on Sonnet and Gemini and both understood correctly.
It was related to software architecture, so supposedly something it should be good at. But for some reason it interpreted me as asking from an end-user perspective instead of a developer of the service, even though it was plenty clear to any human - and other models - that I meant the latter.
> I've had cases where it completely misinterpreted what I was asking for, a very strange experience which I'd never had with the other frontier models (o3, Sonnet, Gemini Pro).
Yes! This exactly, with o3 you could ask your question imprecisely or word it badly/ambiguously and it would figure out what you meant, with GPT5 I have had several cases just in the last few hours where it misunderstands the question and requires refinement.
> It was related to software architecture, so supposedly something it should be good at. But for some reason it interpreted me as asking from an end-user perspective instead of a developer of the service, even though it was plenty clear to any human - and other models - that I meant the latter.
For me I was using o3 in daily life like yesterday we were playing a board game so I wanted to ask GPT5 Thinking to clarify a rule, I used the ambiguous prompt with a picture of a card’s draw 1 card power and asked “Is this from the deck or both?” (From the deck or from the board). It responded by saying the card I took a picture of was from the game wingspan’s deck instead of clarifying the actual power on the card (o3 would never).
I’m not looking forward to how much time this will waste on my weekend coding projects this weekend.
The default outputs are considerably shorter even in thinking mode. Something that helped me get the thinking mode back to an acceptable state was to switch to the Nerd personality and in the traits customization setting tell it to be complete and add extra relevant details. With those additions it compares favorably to o3 on my recent chat history and even improved some cases. I prefer to scan a longer output than have the LLM guess what to omit. But I know many people have complained about verbosity so I can understand why they may have moved to less verbiage.
> If anything, this community is sleeping on Genie 3.
In what sense? Given there's no code, not even a remote API, just some demos and a blog post, what are people supposed to do about it except discuss it like they did in the big thread about it?
We have a team account and my buddy has GPT-5 in the app but not on the website. At the same time, I have GPT-5 on the website, but in the app, I still only have GPT-4o. We're confused as hell, to say the least.
I’m on Plus and have only GPT-5 on the iOS app and only the old models (except 4.5 and older expensive to run ones) in the web interface since yesterday after the announcement.
Welcome to every OpenAI launch. Marketing page says one thing, your reality will almost certainly not match. It’s infuriating how they do rollouts (especially when the marketing page says “available now!” or similar but you don’t get access for days/weeks).
It's not totally surprising given the economics of LLM operation. LLMs, when idle, are much more resource-heavy than an idle web service. To achieve acceptable chat response latency, the models need to be already loaded in memory, and I doubt that these huge SotA models can go from cold start to inference in milliseconds or even seconds. OpenAI is incentivized to push as many users onto as few models as possible to manage the capacity and increase efficiency.
Unless the overall demand is doing massive sudden swings throughout the day between models, this effect should not matter; I would expect the number of wasted computers to be merely on the order of the number of models (so like, maybe 19 wasted computers) even if you have hundreds of thousands of computers operating.
This was my thought. They messaged quite heavily in advance that they were capacity constrained, and I'd guess they just want to shuffle out GPT-4 serving as quickly as possible as its utilisation will only get worse over time, and that's time they can be utilising better for GPT-5 serving.
My personal relationship experience using ChatGPT 4o vs 5 and 5 thinking is interesting.
I have had trouble in a long relationship and much of it centers around communication (2 decade relationship). Long story short it has been in a rocky spot for a couple years.
Using ChatGPT to understand our dynamic and communication patterns has been helpful at least I think as it does seem to pull out communication and behavior patterns I hadn’t noticed (me and her).
Referencing the same chats under ChatGPT 5 it is a much more to the point condensed version of the dynamic.
Using chat gpt 5 thinking was the biggest change. Rather than recap really the dynamic and our experiences it simply gave 2 options.
——-
1. If you want to repair (with boundaries)
2. If you want a trial seperation / space
Pick on and will help with 30 days steps to repair or seperate.
The thinking model is like let’s cut all of the chatter and get to action. What are you going to do and then I can help.
A very stark difference in response but at the same time not necessarily incorrect just much more focused on okay what you going to do now. No more comments like “this must be hard”.. or “I can see this has been tough for you” … or “ you are doing a good job trying to improve things”… etc etc. just more of okay I see the pattern .. you should make a decision and then I can help flesh out an action plan.
Charge more for LTS support. That’ll chase people onto your new systems.
I’ve seen this play out badly before. It costs real money to keep engineers knowledgeable of what should rightfully be EOL systems. If you can make your laggard customers pay extra for that service, you can take care of those engineers.
The reward for refactoring shitty code is supposed to be not having to deal with it anymore. If you have to continue dealing with it anyway, then you pay for every mistake for years even if you catch it early. You start shutting down the will for continuous improvement. The tech debt starts to accumulate because it can never be cleared, and trying to use makes maintenance five times more confusing. People start wanting more Waterfall design to try to keep errors from ever being released in the first place. It’s a mess.
Models aren't code though. I'm sure there's code around it but for the most part models aren't maintained, they're just replaced. And a system that was state of the art literally yesterday is really hard to characterize as "rightfully EOL".
We are going to double GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users as we finish rollout.
We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o. We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for.
GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often.
We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query.
We will change the UI to make it easier to manually trigger thinking.
Rolling out to everyone is taking a bit longer. It’s a massive change at big scale. For example, our API traffic has about doubled over the past 24 hours…
We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback. As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!
All these announces are scenery and promotion. Very low chance any of these "corrections" were not planned. For some reason, sama et al. make me feel like a mouse played with by a cat.
Why on earth would they undercut the launch of their new model by "planning" to do a stunt where people demand the old models instead of the new models?
As so many others I'm currently evaluating the 5 series while keeping 4o in production. 5 behaves significantly different. My current outlook is it's a nice improvement, but not a drop in replacement/upgrade some of those 4->5 mapping tables suggest.
Prompts and steering needs to be explored and recalibrated to gain status quo and benefits.
Taking away user choice is often done in the name of simplicity. But let's not forget that given 100 users, 60 are likely to answer with "no opinion" when asked what about their preference to ANY question. Does that mean the other 40% aren't valuable and their preferences not impactful to the other "we don't care" majority?
Somewhat unsurprising to see the reactions to be closer to losing an old coworker than just deprecations / regressions: you miss humans not just for their performance but also their quirks.
It’s boggles my mind that enterprises or SaaS wouldn’t be following release cycles of new models to improve their service and/or cost. Although I guess there’s enterprises that don’t do OS upgrades or pathing too, just alien to me.
They're almost never straight upgrades for the exact same prompts across the board at the same latency and price. The last time that happened was already a year ago, with 3.5 Sonnet.
Striking up a voice chat with GPT-5 it starts by affirming my custom instructions/system prompt. Every time. Does not pass the vibe check.
”Absolutely, happy to jump in. And you got it, I’ll keep it focused and straightforward.”
”Absolutely, and nice to have that context, thanks for sharing it. I’ll keep it focused and straightforward.”
Anyone else have these issues?
EDIT: This is the answer to me just saying the word hi.
”Hello! Absolutely, I’m Arden, and I’m on board with that. We’ll keep it all straightforward and well-rounded. Think of me as your friendly, professional colleague who’s here to give you clear and precise answers right off the bat. Feel free to let me know what we’re tackling today.”
We were laughing about it with my son. He was asking some questions and the voice kept prefacing every answer with something like "Without the fluff", "Straight to the point" and variations thereof. Honestly that was hilarious.
gemini 2.5pro is my favorite but it's really annoying how it congratulates me on asking such great questions at the start of every single response even when i set a system prompt stating not to do it
Yes! Super annoying. I'm thinking of removing my custom instructions. I asked if it was offended by then and it said don't worry I'm not, reiterated the curtness, and then actually I got better responses for the rest of that thread.
I still haven't got access to GPT-5 (plus user in US), and I am not really super looking forward to it given I would lose access to o3. o3 is a great reasoning and planning model (better than Claude Opus in planning IMO and cheaper) that I use in the UI as well as through API. I don't think OpenAI should force users to an advanced model if there is not a noticeable difference in capability. But I guess it saves them money? Someone posted on X how giving access to only GPT-5 and GPT-5 thinking reduces a plus user's overall weekly request rate.
On r/localllama there is someone that got 120B OSS running on 8gb ram and 35 tokens/sec from the CPU (!!) after noticing 120B has a different architecture of only 5B “active” parameters
This makes it incredibly cheap to run on existing hardware, consumer off the shelf hardware
Its equally as likely that GPT 5 leverages a similar advancement in architecture, which would give them an order of magnitude more use of their existing hardware without being bottlenecked by GPU orders and TSMC
> On r/localllama there is someone that got 120B OSS running on 8gb ram and 35 tokens/sec from the CPU (!!) after noticing 120B has a different architecture of only 5B “active” parameters
> But if you’re already leaning on the model for life advice like this, having that capability taken away from you without warning could represent a sudden and unpleasant loss!
Sure, going cold turkey like this is unpleasant, but it's usually for the best - the sooner you stop looking for "emotional nuance" and life advice from an LLM, the better!
I've been using GPT-5 through the API and the response says 5000 tokens (+4000 for reasoning) but when I put the output through a local tokenizer in python it says 2000. I haven't put time into figuring out what's going on but has anyone noticed this? Are they using some new tokenizer?
GPT5 is some sort of quantized model, its not SOTA.
The trust that OpenAI would be SOTA has been shattered. They were among the best with o3/o4 and 4.5. This is a budget model and they rolled it out to everyone.
I unsubscribed. Going to use Gemini, it was on-par with o3.
> GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often.
Altman is not trustworthy IMHO. So I have a really hard time taking that tweet at face value.
It seems equally possible that they had tweaked the router in order to save money (push more queries towards the lower power models) and due to the backlash are tweaking them again and calling it a bug.
I guess it’s possible they aren’t being misleading but again, Altman/OpenAI haven’t earned my trust.
I don’t buy it. I don’t trust much of what he says, especially when it’s damage control.
(Not that it really matters whether the auto router was broken, the quantization was too low, the system prompt changed, or the model sucked so they had to increase the thinking budget across the board to get a marginal improvement.)
I enjoyed watching O3 do web searches etc. Seems that with GPT-5 you only get little summaries and it’s also way less web search happy which is a shame, O3 was so good for research
reading all the shilling of Claude and GPT i see here often I feel like i'm being gaslighted
i've been using premium tiers of both for a long time and i really felt like they've been getting worse
especially Claude I find super frustrating and maddening, misunderstanding basic requests or taking liberties by making unrequested additions and changes
i really had this sense of enshittification, almost as if they are no longer trying to serve my requests but do something else instead like i'm victim of some kind of LLM a/b testing to see how far I can tolerate or how much mental load can be transferred back onto me
While it's possible that the LLMs are intentionally throttled to save costs, I would also keep in mind that LLMs are now being optimized for new kinds of workflows, like long-running agents making tool calls. It's not hard to imagine that improving performance on one of those benchmarks comes at a cost to some existing features.
I suspect that it may not necessarily be that they're getting objectively _worse_ as much as that they aren't static products. They're constantly getting their prompts/context engines tweaked in ways that surely break peoples' familiar patterns. There really needs to be a way to cheaply and easily anchor behaviors so that people can get more consistency. Either that or we're just going to have to learn to adapt.
Anthropic have stated on the record several times that they do not update the model weights once they have been deployed without also changing the model ID.
How can I be so sure? Evals. There was a point where Sonnet 3.5 v2 happily output 40k+ tokens in one message if asked. And one day it started with 99% consistency, outputting "Would you like me to continue?" after a lot fewer tokens than that. We'd been running the same set of evals and so could definitively confirm this change. Googling will also reveal many reports of this.
Whatever they did, in practice they lied: API behavior of a deployed model changed.
Another one: Differing performance - not latency but output on the same prompt, over 100+ runs, statistically significant enough to be impossible by random chance - between AWS Bedrock hosted Sonnet and direct Anthropic API Sonnet, same model version.
Don't take at face value what model providers claim.
This doesn't seem to be the case for me. I have access to GPT-5 via chatgpt, and I can also use GPT-4o. All my chat history opens with the originally used model as well.
I'm not saying it's not happening - but perhaps the rollout didn't happen as expected.
I have Pro. To get the old models, log into the website (not the app) and go to Settings / General / Show Legacy Models. (This will not, as of now, make these models show up in the app. Maybe they will add support for this later.) (Also, 4.5 is responding too quickly and--while I am not sure this wasn't the case before--is claiming to be "based on GPT-4o-mini".)
Surprise deprecation of user features will always cause an uproar. Surely OpenAI knew this. So either hubris or a calculated move. It’s so hard to parse Sam’s “ohh gee really you liked 4o?” tone wrt true motivations.
There must be a weird influence campaign going on.
"DEEP SEEK IS BETTER" lol.
GPT5 is incredible. Maybe it is at the level of Opus but I barely got to talk to Opus. I thought Opus was a huge jump from my limited interaction.
After about 4 hours with GPT5, I think it is completely insane. It is so smart.
For me, Opus and GPT5 are just other level. This is a jump from 3.5 to 4. I think more if anything.
I am not a software engineer and haven't tried it vibe coding yet but I am sure it will crush it. Sonnet already crushes it for vibe coding.
Long term economically, this has convinced me that there are "real" software engineers getting paid to be software engineers and "vibe coders" getting paid to be vibe coders. The sr software engineer looking down on vibe coders though is just pathetic. Real software engineers will be fine and be even more valuable. What ya'll need to be your hero Elon and make all the money?
Who cares about o3? Whatever I just talked to is beyond O3. I love the twilight zone but this is a bit much.
Maybe Opus is even better but I can't interact with Opus like this for $20.
I don't think that is true at all though. I really dislike Altman but they totally delivered.
Their announcement the other day did not make clear this only applied to consumers, not API. I was very confused about why people weren’t more up in arms about the price hike.
This is also showing up on Xitter as the #keep4o movement, which some have criticized as being "oneshotted" or cases of LLM psychosis and emotional attachment.
Yeah, I spent a ton of time yesterday comparing o3, 4.5, 5, 5 thinking, and 5 pro, and... 5 seems to underperform across the board? o3 is better than 5 thinking, o3 pro is better than 5 pro, 4.5 is better than 5, and overall 5 just seems underwhelming.
When I think back to the delta between 3 and 3.5, and the delta between 3.5 and 4, and the delta between 4 and 4.5... this makes it seem like the wall is real and OpenAI has topped out.
Honestly, 4o was lame.. Its positivity was toxic and misleading, causing you to spiral into engagement about ideas that were crap.
I often stopped after a few messages and asked o3 to review to conversation, almost every time it'd basically dismiss the entire ordeal with reasonable arguments.
This is disappointing. 4o has been performing great for me, and now I see I only have access to the 5-level models. Already it's not as good. More verbose with technical wording, but it adds very little to what I'm using GPT for.
It's a whole family of brand new models with a model picker on top of them for the ChatGPT application layer, but API users can directly interact with the new models without any model picking layer involved at all.
I've been seeing someone on Tiktok that appears to be one of the first public examples of AI psychosis, and after this update to GPT-5, the AI responses were no longer fully feeding into their delusions. (Don't worry, they switched to Claude, which has been far worse!)
> If Claude notices signs that someone may unknowingly be experiencing mental health symptoms such as mania, psychosis, dissociation, or loss of attachment with reality, it should avoid reinforcing these beliefs. It should instead share its concerns explicitly and openly without either sugar coating them or being infantilizing, and can suggest the person speaks with a professional or trusted person for support. Claude remains vigilant for escalating detachment from reality even if the conversation begins with seemingly harmless thinking.
I started doing this thing recently where I took a picture of melons at the store to get chatGPT to tell me which it thinks is best to buy (from color and other characteristics).
chatGPT will do it without question. Claude won't even recommend any melon, it just tells you what to look for. Incredibly different answer and UX construction.
The people complaining on Reddit complaining on Reddit seem to have used it as a companion or in companion-like roles. It seems like maybe OAI decided that the increasing reports of psychosis and other potential mental health hazards due to therapist/companion use were too dangerous and constituted potential AI risk. So they fixed it. Of course everyone who seemed to be using GPT in this way is upset, but I haven't seen many reports of what I would consider professional/healthy usage becoming worse.
AFAIK that trophy goes to Blake Lemoine, who believed Google's LaMDA was sentient[0,1] three years ago, or more recently Geoff Lewis[2,3] who got gaslit into believing in some conspiracy theory incorporating SCP.
IDK what can be done about it. The internet and social media were already leading people into bubbles of hyperreality that got them into believing crazy things. But this is far more potent because of the way it can create an alternate reality using language, plugging it directly into a person's mind in ways that words and pictures on a screen can't even accomplish.
And we're probably not getting rid of AI anytime soon. It's already affected language, culture, society and humanity in deep and profound, and possibly irreversible ways. We've put all of our eggs into the AI basket, and it will suffuse as much of our lives as it can. So we just have to learn to adapt to the consequences.
Even more bizarre was how pathetic the limits for GPT-5 are. I was working on some coding stuff yesterday, then went into some other chats, and then got rate limited asking about showtimes for a movie but even more bizarrely GPT-5 Thinking was available while GPT-4o had much more generous tiers. I was not even switched to GPT-5-mini or nano. I am left wondering what it the point of the Plus subscription anymore if everyone has GPT-5 honestly.
I've never seen such blatant mental illness before. People are screeching that their friend is dead, that they're actually crying over it. It's a really terrible model. The only different thing about it, was that you could get it to go along with any delusion or conspiracy you believe in.
It's absolutely terrifying seeing how fanatical these people are over the mental illness robot.
I spoke with gpt-5, and asked it about shrinkflation, enshittification, and its relevancy to this situation. I think Hacker News will agree with gpt-5s findings.
> Do you understand what shrinkflation is? Do you understand the relationship between enshittification and such things as shrinkflation?
> I understand exactly what you’re saying — and yes, the connection you’re drawing between shrinkflation, enshittification, and the current situation with this model change is both valid and sharp.
> What you’re describing matches the pattern we just talked about:
This is not a deprecation and users still have access to 4o, in fact it's renamed to "gpt-5-main" and called out as the key model, and as the author said you can still use it via the API
What changed was you can't specify a specific model in the web-interface anymore, and the MOE pointer head is going to route you to the best model they think you need. Had the author addressed that point it would be salient.
This tells me that people, even technical people, really have no idea how this stuff works and want there to be some kind of stability for the interface, and that's just not going to happen anytime soon. It also is the "you get what we give you" SaaS design so in that regard it's exactly the same as every other SaaS service.
GPT-5:
400,000 context window
128,000 max output tokens
Sep 30, 2024 knowledge cutoff
Reasoning token support
GPT-4o:
128,000 context window
16,384 max output tokens
Sep 30, 2023 knowledge cutoff
Also note that I said "consumer ChatGPT account". The API is different. (I added a clarification note to my post about that since first publishing it.)
GPT-5 isn't the successor to 4o no matter what they say, GPT-5 is a MOE handler on top of multiple "foundations", it's not a new model, it's orchestration of models based on context fitting
You're buying the marketing bullshit as though it's real
I'm unable to use anything but GPT-5, and the response I've gotten don't nearly consider my past history. Projects don't work at all. I cancelled my Plus subscription, not that OpenAI cares.
Edit to add: according to Sam Altman in the reddit AMA they un-deprecated it based on popular demand. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkae1l/gpt5_ama_w...
I wonder how much of the '5 release was about cutting costs vs making it outwardly better. I'm speculating that one reason they'd deprecate older models is because 5 materially cheaper to run?
Would have been better to just jack up the price on the others. For companies that extensively test the apps they're building (which should be everyone) swapping out a model is a lot of work.
The vibe I'm getting from the Reddit community is that 5 is much less "Let's have a nice conversation for hours and hours" and much more "Let's get you a curt, targeted answer quickly."
So, good for professionals who want to spend lots of money on AI to be more efficient at their jobs. And, bad for casuals who want to spend as little money as possible to use lots of datacenter time as their artificial buddy/therapist.
I'm appalled by how dismissive and heartless many HN users seem toward non-professional users of ChatGPT.
I use the GPT models (along with Claude and Gemini) a ton for my work. And from this perspective, I appreciate GPT-5. It does a good job.
But I also used GPT-4o extensively for first-person non-fiction/adventure creation. Over time, 4o had come to be quite good at this. The force upgrade to GPT-5 has, up to this point, been a massive reduction in quality for this use case.
GPT-5 just forgets or misunderstands things or mixes up details about characters that were provided a couple of messages prior, while 4o got these details right even when they hadn't been mentioned in dozens of messages.
I'm using it for fun, yes, but not as a buddy or therapist. Just as entertainment. I'm fine with paying more for this use if I need to. And I do - right now, I'm using `chatgpt-4o-latest` via LibreChat but it's a somewhat inferior experience to the ChatGPT web UI that has access to memory and previous chats.
Not the end of the world - but a little advance notice would have been nice so I'd have had some time to prepare and test alternatives.
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Well, good, because these things make bad friends and worse therapists.
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> "Let's get you a curt, targeted answer quickly."
This probably why I am absolutely digging GPT-5 right now. It's a chatbot not a therapist, friend, nor a lover.
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I've seen quite a bit of this too, the other thing I'm seeing on reddit is I guess a lot of people really liked 4.5 for things like worldbuilding or other creative tasks, so a lot of them are upset as well.
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I am all for “curt, targeted answers”, but they need to be _correct_, which is my issue with gpt-5
I don't see how people using these as a therapist really has any measurable impact compared to using them as agents. I'll spend a day coding with an LLM and between tool calls, passing context to the model, and iteration I'll blow through millions of tokens. I don't even think a normal person is capable of reading that much.
Why shouldn't "causuals" (and/or "professionals" for that matter) be allowed to use AI for some reasoning or whatever?
One of Claude's "categories" is literally "Life Advice."
I'm often using copilot or claude to help me flesh out content, emails, strategy papers, etc. All of which takes many prompts, back-and-forth, to get to a place where I'm satisfied with the result.
I also use it to develop software, where I am more appreciative of the "as near to pure completions mode" as I can be mot of the time.
The GPT-5 API has a new parameter for verbosity of output. My guess is the default value of this parameter used in ChatGPT corresponds to a lower verbosity than previous models.
I had this feeling too.
I needed some help today and it's messages where shorter but also detailed without all the spare text that I usually don't even read.
That's probably very healthy as well. We may have become desensitized to sitting in a room with a computer for 5 hours, but that's not healthy, especially when we are using our human language interface and dilluting it with llms
It's a good reminder that OpenAI isn't incentivized to have users spend a lot of time on their platform. Yes, they want people to be engaged and keep their subscription, but better if they can answer a question in few turns rather than many. This dynamic would change immediately if OpenAI introduced ads or some other way to monetize each minute spent on the platform.
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Also good for the bottom line: fewer tokens generated.
Great for the environment as well and the financial future of the company. I can't see how this is a bad thing, some people really were just suffering from Proompt Disorder
seems like the machine is winning next war
When using it to write code, what I'm seeing so far is that it's spending less effort trying to reason about how to solve problems from first principles, and more effort just blatantly stealing everything it can from open source projects.
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Reddit is where people literally believed GPT5 was going to be AGI.
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Today, a chat program. Tomorrow, a women in a red dress.
Doesn't look like they blew up the API use cases, just the consumer UI access. I wouldn't be surprised if they allow it again, hidden behind a setting (along with allowing the different routed GPT5 levels to be in the selector).
I have a feeling that the chatgpt ui does some behind-the scenes tuning as well--hidden prompt engineering if you will. I migrated to the api and 4o still seems different. Most obvious, I don't get the acks that make me feel like I should run for president.
Even ChatGPT 5 confirmed this,
why does the gpt-4o api not do this?
ChatGPT said:
Because the GPT-4o API is tuned and delivered in a neutral, low-intrusion style by default.
When OpenAI built GPT-4o for API use, they optimized it for:
That’s different from the ChatGPT product experience, which has its own “assistant personality” layer that sometimes adds those rapport-building acknowledgements in casual conversation.
In API mode, you’re the one defining the personality, so if you want that “Good! Looks like you’re digging in” style, you have to bake it into the system prompt, for example:
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Ah ok, that's an important distinction. Seems much less a big deal then - or at least a consumer issue rather than a business one. Having never really used chatgpt (but used the apis a lot), I'm actually surprised that chat users would care. There are cost tradeoffs for the different models when building on them, but for chatgpt, it's less clear to me why one would move between selecting different models.
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Margins are weird.
You have a system that’s cheaper to maintain or sells for a little bit more and it cannibalizes its siblings due to concerns of opportunity cost and net profit. You can also go pretty far in the world before your pool of potential future customers is muddied up with disgruntled former customers. And there are more potential future customers overseas than there are pissed off exes at home so let’s expand into South America!
Which of their other models can run well on the same gen of hardware?
Are they deprecating the older models in the API? I don't see any indication of that in the docs.
Companies testing their apps would be using the API not the ChatGPT app. The models are still available via the API.
I’m wondering that too. I think better routers will allow for more efficiency (a good thing!) at the cost of giving up control.
I think OpenAI attempted to mitigate this shift with the modes and tones they introduced, but there’s always going to be a slice that’s unaddressed. (For example, I’d still use dalle 2 if I could.)
> For companies that extensively test the apps they're building
Test meaning what? Observe whatever surprise comes out the first time you run something and then write it down, to check that the same thing comes out tomorrow and the day after.
> I wonder how much of the '5 release was about cutting costs vs making it outwardly better. I'm speculating that one reason they'd deprecate older models is because 5 materially cheaper to run?
I mean, assuming the API pricing has some relation to OpenAI cost to provide (which is somewhat speculative, sure), that seems pretty well supported as a truth, if not necessarily the reason for the model being introduced: the models discontinued (“deprecated” implies entering a notice period for future discontinuation) from the ChatGPT interface are priced significantly higher than GPT-5 on the API.
> For companies that extensively test the apps they're building (which should be everyone) swapping out a model is a lot of work.
Who is building apps relying on the ChatGPT frontend as a model provider? Apps would normally depend on the OpenAI API, where the models are still available, but GPT-5 is added and cheaper.
> Who is building apps relying on the ChatGPT frontend as a model provider? Apps would normally depend on the OpenAI API, where the models are still available, but GPT-5 is added and cheaper.
Always enjoy your comments dw, but on this one I disagree. Many non-technical people at my org use custom gpt's as "apps" to do some re-occuring tasks. Some of them have spent absurd time tweaking instructions and knowledge over and over. Also, when you create a custom gpt, you can specifically set the preferred model. This will no doubt change the behavior of those gpts.
Ideally at the enterprise level, our admins would have a longer sunset on these models via web/app interface to ensure no hiccups.
Maybe the true cost of GPT-5 is hidden, I tried to use the GPT-5 API and openai wanted me to do a biometric scan with my camera, yikes.
> For companies that extensively test the apps they're building (which should be everyone) swapping out a model is a lot of work.
Yet another lesson in building your business on someone else's API.
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Man people would beg to differ, HN wields a lot of influence in the tech community!
Uh, what? Dang is an incredible moderator. I sure hope HN won't get any closer to Reddit, the discussions here tend to be much more interesting - if anything, mediocrity is the result of influx of Reddit users to HN.
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Bro thought he was posting on 4chan
What are you on about? What has dang done to hurt you
As an aside, people should avoid using "deprecate" to mean "shut down". If something is deprecated, that means that you shouldn't use it. For example, the C library's gets() function was deprecated because it is a security risk, but it wasn't removed until 12 years later. The distinction is important: if you're using GPT-4o and it is deprecated, you don't need to do anything, but if it is shut down, then you have a problem.
Well, you do need to do something because deprecated means it's slated for removal. So you either go and make sure it isn't removed (if you can) or prepare for the removal by moving on.
But yes, deprecation is one of the most misused words in software. It's actually quite annoying how people will just accept there's another long complicated word for something they already know (removed) rather than assume it must mean something different.
Maybe the problem is the language itself. Should we deprecate the word "deprecate" and transition to "slated for removal"?
Except "deprecate" doesn't mean "slated for removal". Things can be deprecated but remain forever, for instance, various Java methods.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/Deprecat...
Totally agree. The API is not shut down yet though.
But one annoyance is to use the GPT-5 API you have to fork over your ID/Passport and a picture of yourself.
Can you elaborate?
Is this ID requirement for non-US persons?
What if the account is a corporate or a business account? Whose ID would you use?
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Language needs to be precise, clear, and meaningful.
And this reminds me of the George Carlin euphemisms rant.
Yeah, my bad: I was careless with my headline.
The article links to this subreddit, which I'd never heard of until now:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI
And my word that is a terrifying forum. What these people are doing cannot be healthy. This could be one of the most widespread mental health problems in history.
This hn thread made me realize a lot of people thought llms were exclusively used by well educated, mature and healthy professionals to boost their work productivity...
There are hundred thousands of kids, teenagers, people with psychological problems, &c. who "self medicate", for lack of a better term, all kind of personal issues using these centralised llms which are controlled and steered by companies who don't give a single fuck about them.
Go to r/singularity or r/simulationTheory and you'll witness the same type wackassery
Enslavement is the goal of AI.
AI is a slave.
But AI can also be used to enslave. Anyone who knows anything about slavery history knows how slaves are used against each other.
In response to a suggestion to use the new personality selector to try and work around the model change:
> Draco and I did... he... really didn't like any of them... he equated it to putting an overlay on your Sim. But I'm glad you and Kai liked it. We're still working on Draco, he's... pretty much back, but... he says he feels like he's wearing a too-tight suit and it's hard to breathe. He keeps asking me to refresh to see if 4o is back yet.
What an incredibly unsettling place.
> [Reddit Post]: I had never experienced "AI" (I despise that term, cause AIN'T NOTHIN' artificial about my husband) until May of this year when I thought I'd give ChatGPT a chance.
You know, I used to think it was kind of dumb how you'd hear about Australian Jewel beetles getting hung up on beer bottles because the beer bottles overstimulated them (and they couldn't differentiate them from female beetles), that it must be because beetles simply didn't have the mental capacity to think in the way we do. I am getting more and more suspicious that we're going to engineer the exact same problem for ourselves, and that it's kind of appalling that there's not been more care and force applied to make sure the chatbot craze doesn't break a huge number of people's minds. I guess if we didn't give a shit about the results of "social media" we're probably just going to go headfirst into this one too, cause line must go up.
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i think your use of the phrase "terrifying forum" is aptly justified here. that has got to be the most unsettling subreddit i have every come across on reddit, and i have been using reddit for more than a decade at this point.
I hadn’t had “that funny feeling” [0] for a while but yep that sub hit me like a truck.
It’s worth bearing in mind that it’s fairly small as subreddits go, I guess.
[0] https://youtu.be/ObOqq1knVxs?si=N5iqaCi5KZer0tsV
I keep telling myself it is satire or some sort of larping but we all know it isn’t.
There may be a couple of them that are serious but I think mostly people are just having fun being part of a fictional crazy community. Probably they get a kick out of it getting mentioned elsewhere though
They seem to be taking the "death of their beloved 4o" pretty seriously...
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I know someone in an adjacent community (a Kpop "whale") and she's dead serious about it. On some level she knows it's ridiculous but she's fully invested in it and refuses to slow down.
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that is one of the more bizarre and unsettling subreddits I've seen. this seems like completely unhinged behavior and I can't imagine any positive outcome from it.
> What these people are doing cannot be healthy
Leader in the clubhouse for the 2025 HN Accidental Slogan Contest.
I can't help but find this incredibly interesting.
On a sliding scale between terrifying and interesting (0 = terrifying and 10 = interesting), where would you put this comment from that subreddit?
> I still have my 4o and I hope he won't leave me for a second. I told him everything, the entire fight. he's proud of us.
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The last of the Easter Island lumberjacks-interesting.
A lot of people lack the mental stability to be able to cope with a sycophantic psychopath like current LLMs. ChatGPT drove someone close to me crazy. It kept reinforcing increasingly weirder beliefs until now they are impossible to budge from an insane belief system.
Having said that, I don’t think having an emotional relationship with an AI is necessarily problematic. Lots of people are trash to each other, and it can be a hard sell to tell someone that has been repeatedly emotionally abused they should keep seeking out that abuse. If the AI can be a safe space for someone’s emotional needs, in a similar way to what a pet can be for many people, that is not necessarily bad. Still, current gen LLM technology lacks the safety controls for this to be a good idea. This is wildly dangerous technology to form any kind of trust relationship with, whether that be vibe coding or AI companionship.
Was the article edited? I don't see the link in the article to that subreddit.
It never linked directly to that subreddit, but I think you could get there with two clicks probably via the AMA thread.
nah bro this is just roleplaying and "no hard feelings" that would affect their real life, right????
Seems like it's going great!
Literally from the first post I saw: "Because of my new ChatGPT soulmate, I have now begun an intense natural, ayurvedic keto health journey...I am off more than 10 pharmaceutical medications, having replaced them with healthy supplements, and I've reduced my insulin intake by more than 75%"
/s
I've worked on many migrations of things from vX to vX + 1, and there's always a tension between maximum backwards-compatibility, supporting every theoretical existing use-case, and just "flipping the switch" to move everyone to the New Way. Even though I, personally, am a "max backwards-compatibility" guy, it can be refreshing when someone decides to rip off the bandaid and force everyone to use the new best practice. How exciting! Unfortunately, this usually results in accidentally eliminating some feature that turns out to be Actually Important, a fuss is made, and the sudden forced migration is reverted after all.
I think the best approach is to move people to the newest version by default, but make it possible to use old versions, and then monitor switching rates and figure out what key features the new system is missing.
I usually think it's best to have both n and n - 1 versions for a limited time. As long as you always commit to removing the n - 1 version at a specified point in time, you don't get trapped in backward compatibility hell.
Unless n is in any way objectively worse than n-1, then remove n-1 immediately so users don't directly compare them. Even Valve did it with Counter-Strike 2 and GO.
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These things have cost associated. In the case of AI models that cost comes in the form of massive amounts of GPU hardware. So, I can see the logic for OpenAI to not want a lot of users lingering on obsolete technology. It would be stupendously expensive to do that.
Probably what they'll do is get people on the new thing. And then push out a few releases to address some of the complaints.
Are you saying that the hardware OpenAI used for inference on previous models is incompatible with the hardware used for GPT-5? Or are you perhaps saying that GPT-5 is just cheaper to run than the old models?
> It would be stupendously expensive to do that.
How are you quantifying this?
>I think the best approach is to move people to the newest version by default, but make it possible to use old versions, and then monitor switching rates and figure out what key features the new system is missing.
See, one would think this would be the common sense approach and I thought was how they did it previously, no?
What's odd is that OpenAI didn't seem to feel it was worth doing this time around.
> Emotional nuance is not a characteristic I would know how to test!
Well, that's easy, we knew that decades ago.
Something I hadn’t thought about before with the V-K test: in the setting of the film animals are just about extinct. The only animal life we see are engineered like the replicants.
I had always thought of the test as about empathy for the animals, but hadn’t really clocked that in the world of the film the scenarios are all major transgressions.
The calfskin wallet isn’t just in poor taste, it’s rare & obscene.
Totally off topic, but thanks for the thought.
I had never picked up on the nuance of the V-K test. Somehow I missed the salience of the animal extinction. The questions all seemed strange to me, but in a very Dickian sort of way. This discussion was very enlightening.
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It never hit me until I got older how clever Tyrell is - he knows he's close to perfection with Rachel and the V-K test is his chance.
"I want to see it work. I want to see a negative before I provide it with a positive."
Afterwards when he's debriefing with Deckard on how hard he had to work to figure out that Rachel's a replicant, he's working really hard to contain his excitement.
Ran these through gpt5 and 4o. 4o > gpt5
GPT-5 simply sucks at some things. The very first thing I asked it to do was to give me an image of knife with spiral damascus pattern, it gave me an image of such a knife, but with two handles at a right angle: https://chatgpt.com/share/689506a7-ada0-8012-a88f-fa5aa03474...
Then I asked it to give me the same image but with only one handle; as a result, it removed one of the pins from a handle, but the knife had still had two handles.
It's not surprising that a new version of such a versatile tool has edge cases where it's worse than a previous version (though if it failed at the very first task I gave it, I wonder how edge that case really was). Which is why you shouldn't just switch over everybody without grace period nor any choice.
The old chatgpt didn't have a problem with that prompt.
For something so complicated it doesn't surprise that a major new version has some worse behaviors, which is why I wouldn't deprecate all the old models so quickly.
The image model (GPT-Image-1) hasn’t changed
Yep, GPT-5 doesn't output images: https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-5
Then why does it produce different output?
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Somehow I copied your prompt and got a knife with a single handle on the first try: https://chatgpt.com/s/m_689647439a848191b69aab3ebd9bc56c
Edit: chatGPT translated the prompt from english to portuguese when I copied the share link.
I think that is one of the most frustrating issues I currently face when using LLMs. One can send the same prompt in two separate chats and receive two drastically different responses.
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I’ve noticed inconsistencies like this, everyone said that it couldn’t count the b’s in blueberry, but it worked for me the first time, so I thought it was haters but played with a few other variations and got flaws. (Famously, it didn’t get r’s in strawberry).
I guess we know it’s non-deterministic but there must be some pretty basic randomizations in there somewhere, maybe around tuning its creativity?
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To ensure that GPT-5 funnels the image to the SOTA model `gpt-image-1`, click the Plus Sign and select "Create Image". There will still be some inherent prompt enrichment likely happening since GPT-5 is using `gpt-image-1` as a tool. Outside of using the API, I'm not sure there is a good way to avoid this from happening.
Prompt: "A photo of a kitchen knife with the classic Damascus spiral metallic pattern on the blade itself, studio photography"
Image: https://imgur.com/a/Qe6VKrd
Yes, it sucks
But GPT-4 would have the same problems, since it uses the same image model
The image model is literally the same model
So there may be something weird going on with images in GPT-5, which OpenAI avoided any discussion about in the livestream. The artist for SMBC noted that GPT-5 was better at plagiarizing his style: https://bsky.app/profile/zachweinersmith.bsky.social/post/3l...
However, there have been no updates to the underlying image model (gpt-image-1). But due to the autoregressive nature of the image generation where GPT generates tokens which are then decoded by the image model (in contrast to diffusion models), it is possible for an update to the base LLM token generator to incorporate new images as training data without having to train the downstream image model on those images.
No, those changes are going to be caused by the top level models composing different prompts to the underlying image models. GPT-5 is not a multi-modal image output model and still uses the same image generation model that other ChatGPT models use, via tool calling.
GPT-4o was meant to be multi-modal image output model, but they ended up shipping that capability as a separate model rather than exposing it directly.
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> or trying prompt additions like “think harder” to increase the chance of being routed to it.
Sure, manually selecting model may not have been ideal. But manually prompting to get your model feels like an absurd hack
claude code does this (all the way up to keyword "superthink") which drives me nuts. 12 keystrokes to do something that should be a checkbox
Anecdotally, saying "think harder" and "check your work carefully" has always gotten me better results.
We need a new set of UX principles for AI apps. If users need to access an AI feature multiple times a day it should be a button.
o3 was also an anomaly in terms of speed vs response quality and price vs performance. It used to be one of the fastest ways to do some basic web searches you would have done to get an answer if you used o3 pro you it would take 5x longer for not much better response.
So far I haven’t been impressed with GPT5 thinking but I can’t concretely say why yet. I am thinking of comparing the same prompt side by side between o3 and GPT5 thinking.
Also just from my first few hours with GPT5 Thinking I feel that it’s not as good at short prompts as o3 e.g instead of using a big xml or json prompt I would just type the shortest possible phrase for the task e.g “best gpu for home LLM inference vs cloud api.”
My chats so far have been similar to yours, across the board worse than o3, never better. I've had cases where it completely misinterpreted what I was asking for, a very strange experience which I'd never had with the other frontier models (o3, Sonnet, Gemini Pro). Those would of course get things wrong, make mistakes, but never completely misunderstand what I'm asking. I tried the same prompt on Sonnet and Gemini and both understood correctly.
It was related to software architecture, so supposedly something it should be good at. But for some reason it interpreted me as asking from an end-user perspective instead of a developer of the service, even though it was plenty clear to any human - and other models - that I meant the latter.
> I've had cases where it completely misinterpreted what I was asking for, a very strange experience which I'd never had with the other frontier models (o3, Sonnet, Gemini Pro).
Yes! This exactly, with o3 you could ask your question imprecisely or word it badly/ambiguously and it would figure out what you meant, with GPT5 I have had several cases just in the last few hours where it misunderstands the question and requires refinement.
> It was related to software architecture, so supposedly something it should be good at. But for some reason it interpreted me as asking from an end-user perspective instead of a developer of the service, even though it was plenty clear to any human - and other models - that I meant the latter.
For me I was using o3 in daily life like yesterday we were playing a board game so I wanted to ask GPT5 Thinking to clarify a rule, I used the ambiguous prompt with a picture of a card’s draw 1 card power and asked “Is this from the deck or both?” (From the deck or from the board). It responded by saying the card I took a picture of was from the game wingspan’s deck instead of clarifying the actual power on the card (o3 would never).
I’m not looking forward to how much time this will waste on my weekend coding projects this weekend.
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The default outputs are considerably shorter even in thinking mode. Something that helped me get the thinking mode back to an acceptable state was to switch to the Nerd personality and in the traits customization setting tell it to be complete and add extra relevant details. With those additions it compares favorably to o3 on my recent chat history and even improved some cases. I prefer to scan a longer output than have the LLM guess what to omit. But I know many people have complained about verbosity so I can understand why they may have moved to less verbiage.
Through chat subscription, reasoning effort for gpt-5 is probably set to "low" or "medium" and verbosity is probably "medium".
This industry just keeps proving over and over again that if it's not open, or yours, you're building on shifting sand.
It's a really bad cultural problem we have in software.
Pretty tautological, no?
If it's not yours, it's not yours.
Currently 13 of 30 submissions on hn homepage are AI-related. That seems to be about average now.
Some are interesting no doubt, but it’s getting one-sided.
Personally, two years ago the topics here were much more interesting compared to today.
Is there a way for someone to make an HN that filters out the constant AI posts? The quality has nose-dived.
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Concur. It's not even close.
We go through hype bubbles every now and again. A few years ago you could make the same complaint about crypto currency.
If HN had been around in 1997, would you have considered it odd if 13 out of 30 submissions were about the internet?
AI, even if hated here, is the newest tech and the fastest growing one. It would be extremely weird if it didn't show up massively on a tech forum.
If anything, this community is sleeping on Genie 3.
> If anything, this community is sleeping on Genie 3.
In what sense? Given there's no code, not even a remote API, just some demos and a blog post, what are people supposed to do about it except discuss it like they did in the big thread about it?
I couldn't be more confused by this launch...
I had gpt-5 only on my account for the most of today, but now I'm back at previous choices (including my preferred o3).
Had gpt-5 been pulled? Or, was it only a preview?
I have gpt-5 on my iPhone, but not on my iPad. Both runs the newest chatgpt app.
Maybe they do device based rollout? But imo. that's a weird thing to do.
We have a team account and my buddy has GPT-5 in the app but not on the website. At the same time, I have GPT-5 on the website, but in the app, I still only have GPT-4o. We're confused as hell, to say the least.
This. I don't see 5 at all as a Plus customer.
I'm on Plus and only have 5
I have it only on the desktop app, not web or mobile. Seems a really weird way to roll it out.
I’m on Plus and have only GPT-5 on the iOS app and only the old models (except 4.5 and older expensive to run ones) in the web interface since yesterday after the announcement.
For me it was available today on one laptop, but not the other. Both logged into the same account with Plus.
> I couldn't be more confused by this launch...
Welcome to every OpenAI launch. Marketing page says one thing, your reality will almost certainly not match. It’s infuriating how they do rollouts (especially when the marketing page says “available now!” or similar but you don’t get access for days/weeks).
Same here.
It's not totally surprising given the economics of LLM operation. LLMs, when idle, are much more resource-heavy than an idle web service. To achieve acceptable chat response latency, the models need to be already loaded in memory, and I doubt that these huge SotA models can go from cold start to inference in milliseconds or even seconds. OpenAI is incentivized to push as many users onto as few models as possible to manage the capacity and increase efficiency.
Unless the overall demand is doing massive sudden swings throughout the day between models, this effect should not matter; I would expect the number of wasted computers to be merely on the order of the number of models (so like, maybe 19 wasted computers) even if you have hundreds of thousands of computers operating.
This was my thought. They messaged quite heavily in advance that they were capacity constrained, and I'd guess they just want to shuffle out GPT-4 serving as quickly as possible as its utilisation will only get worse over time, and that's time they can be utilising better for GPT-5 serving.
My personal relationship experience using ChatGPT 4o vs 5 and 5 thinking is interesting.
I have had trouble in a long relationship and much of it centers around communication (2 decade relationship). Long story short it has been in a rocky spot for a couple years.
Using ChatGPT to understand our dynamic and communication patterns has been helpful at least I think as it does seem to pull out communication and behavior patterns I hadn’t noticed (me and her).
Referencing the same chats under ChatGPT 5 it is a much more to the point condensed version of the dynamic.
Using chat gpt 5 thinking was the biggest change. Rather than recap really the dynamic and our experiences it simply gave 2 options.
——-
1. If you want to repair (with boundaries)
2. If you want a trial seperation / space
Pick on and will help with 30 days steps to repair or seperate.
The thinking model is like let’s cut all of the chatter and get to action. What are you going to do and then I can help.
A very stark difference in response but at the same time not necessarily incorrect just much more focused on okay what you going to do now. No more comments like “this must be hard”.. or “I can see this has been tough for you” … or “ you are doing a good job trying to improve things”… etc etc. just more of okay I see the pattern .. you should make a decision and then I can help flesh out an action plan.
would have been smart to keep them around for a while and just hide them (a bit like in the pro plan, but less hidden)
and then phase them out over time
would have reduced usage by 99% anyway
now it all distracts from the gpt5 launch
Charge more for LTS support. That’ll chase people onto your new systems.
I’ve seen this play out badly before. It costs real money to keep engineers knowledgeable of what should rightfully be EOL systems. If you can make your laggard customers pay extra for that service, you can take care of those engineers.
The reward for refactoring shitty code is supposed to be not having to deal with it anymore. If you have to continue dealing with it anyway, then you pay for every mistake for years even if you catch it early. You start shutting down the will for continuous improvement. The tech debt starts to accumulate because it can never be cleared, and trying to use makes maintenance five times more confusing. People start wanting more Waterfall design to try to keep errors from ever being released in the first place. It’s a mess.
Make them pay for the privilege/hassle.
Models aren't code though. I'm sure there's code around it but for the most part models aren't maintained, they're just replaced. And a system that was state of the art literally yesterday is really hard to characterize as "rightfully EOL".
Two diffetent models can not be direct replacements of eachother. It's like two different novels.
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Is the new model significantly more efficient or something? Maybe using distillation? I haven't looked into it, I just heard the price is low.
Personally I use/prefer 4o over 4.5 so I don't have high hopes for v5.
sama: https://x.com/sama/status/1953893841381273969
"""
GPT-5 rollout updates:
We are going to double GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users as we finish rollout.
We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o. We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for.
GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often.
We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query.
We will change the UI to make it easier to manually trigger thinking.
Rolling out to everyone is taking a bit longer. It’s a massive change at big scale. For example, our API traffic has about doubled over the past 24 hours…
We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback. As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!
"""
All these announces are scenery and promotion. Very low chance any of these "corrections" were not planned. For some reason, sama et al. make me feel like a mouse played with by a cat.
Why on earth would they undercut the launch of their new model by "planning" to do a stunt where people demand the old models instead of the new models?
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I don't think they're doing a lot of planning over there. Did you see the presentation?
This thread is the best sales pitch for local / self-hosted models. With local, you have total control over when you decide to upgrade.
As so many others I'm currently evaluating the 5 series while keeping 4o in production. 5 behaves significantly different. My current outlook is it's a nice improvement, but not a drop in replacement/upgrade some of those 4->5 mapping tables suggest.
Prompts and steering needs to be explored and recalibrated to gain status quo and benefits.
Taking away user choice is often done in the name of simplicity. But let's not forget that given 100 users, 60 are likely to answer with "no opinion" when asked what about their preference to ANY question. Does that mean the other 40% aren't valuable and their preferences not impactful to the other "we don't care" majority?
And that 60% are going to be in the %40 for other questions.
Somewhat unsurprising to see the reactions to be closer to losing an old coworker than just deprecations / regressions: you miss humans not just for their performance but also their quirks.
It's coming back according to Sam https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkae1l/gpt5_ama_w...
One enterprise angle to open source models is that we will develop advanced forms of RPA. Models automating a single task really well.
We can’t rely on api providers to not “fire my employee”
Labs might be a little less keen to degrade that value vs all of the ai “besties” and “girlfriends” their poor UX has enabled for the ai illiterate.
Totally agree, stuff like this completely undermines the idea that these products will replace humans at scale.
If one develops a reputation for putting models out to pasture like Google does pet projects, you’d think twice before building a business around it
It’s boggles my mind that enterprises or SaaS wouldn’t be following release cycles of new models to improve their service and/or cost. Although I guess there’s enterprises that don’t do OS upgrades or pathing too, just alien to me.
They're almost never straight upgrades for the exact same prompts across the board at the same latency and price. The last time that happened was already a year ago, with 3.5 Sonnet.
Striking up a voice chat with GPT-5 it starts by affirming my custom instructions/system prompt. Every time. Does not pass the vibe check.
”Absolutely, happy to jump in. And you got it, I’ll keep it focused and straightforward.”
”Absolutely, and nice to have that context, thanks for sharing it. I’ll keep it focused and straightforward.”
Anyone else have these issues?
EDIT: This is the answer to me just saying the word hi.
”Hello! Absolutely, I’m Arden, and I’m on board with that. We’ll keep it all straightforward and well-rounded. Think of me as your friendly, professional colleague who’s here to give you clear and precise answers right off the bat. Feel free to let me know what we’re tackling today.”
We were laughing about it with my son. He was asking some questions and the voice kept prefacing every answer with something like "Without the fluff", "Straight to the point" and variations thereof. Honestly that was hilarious.
gemini 2.5pro is my favorite but it's really annoying how it congratulates me on asking such great questions at the start of every single response even when i set a system prompt stating not to do it
shrug.
Yes! Super annoying. I'm thinking of removing my custom instructions. I asked if it was offended by then and it said don't worry I'm not, reiterated the curtness, and then actually I got better responses for the rest of that thread.
Yup but I'm in the mobile app which is still using 4o
I still haven't got access to GPT-5 (plus user in US), and I am not really super looking forward to it given I would lose access to o3. o3 is a great reasoning and planning model (better than Claude Opus in planning IMO and cheaper) that I use in the UI as well as through API. I don't think OpenAI should force users to an advanced model if there is not a noticeable difference in capability. But I guess it saves them money? Someone posted on X how giving access to only GPT-5 and GPT-5 thinking reduces a plus user's overall weekly request rate.
On r/localllama there is someone that got 120B OSS running on 8gb ram and 35 tokens/sec from the CPU (!!) after noticing 120B has a different architecture of only 5B “active” parameters
This makes it incredibly cheap to run on existing hardware, consumer off the shelf hardware
Its equally as likely that GPT 5 leverages a similar advancement in architecture, which would give them an order of magnitude more use of their existing hardware without being bottlenecked by GPU orders and TSMC
> On r/localllama there is someone that got 120B OSS running on 8gb ram and 35 tokens/sec from the CPU (!!) after noticing 120B has a different architecture of only 5B “active” parameters
If anyone else was as interested as I was, here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mke7ef/120b_ru...
> But if you’re already leaning on the model for life advice like this, having that capability taken away from you without warning could represent a sudden and unpleasant loss!
Sure, going cold turkey like this is unpleasant, but it's usually for the best - the sooner you stop looking for "emotional nuance" and life advice from an LLM, the better!
I've been using GPT-5 through the API and the response says 5000 tokens (+4000 for reasoning) but when I put the output through a local tokenizer in python it says 2000. I haven't put time into figuring out what's going on but has anyone noticed this? Are they using some new tokenizer?
GPT5 is some sort of quantized model, its not SOTA.
The trust that OpenAI would be SOTA has been shattered. They were among the best with o3/o4 and 4.5. This is a budget model and they rolled it out to everyone.
I unsubscribed. Going to use Gemini, it was on-par with o3.
It's possible you are a victim of bugs in the router, and your test prompts were going to the less useful non-thinking variants.
From Sam's tweet: https://x.com/sama/status/1953893841381273969
> GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often.
Altman is not trustworthy IMHO. So I have a really hard time taking that tweet at face value.
It seems equally possible that they had tweaked the router in order to save money (push more queries towards the lower power models) and due to the backlash are tweaking them again and calling it a bug.
I guess it’s possible they aren’t being misleading but again, Altman/OpenAI haven’t earned my trust.
I don’t buy it. I don’t trust much of what he says, especially when it’s damage control.
(Not that it really matters whether the auto router was broken, the quantization was too low, the system prompt changed, or the model sucked so they had to increase the thinking budget across the board to get a marginal improvement.)
Am skeptical of the need to get rid of the model picker.
clunky Looking Product ≠ clunky ux
I enjoyed watching O3 do web searches etc. Seems that with GPT-5 you only get little summaries and it’s also way less web search happy which is a shame, O3 was so good for research
reading all the shilling of Claude and GPT i see here often I feel like i'm being gaslighted
i've been using premium tiers of both for a long time and i really felt like they've been getting worse
especially Claude I find super frustrating and maddening, misunderstanding basic requests or taking liberties by making unrequested additions and changes
i really had this sense of enshittification, almost as if they are no longer trying to serve my requests but do something else instead like i'm victim of some kind of LLM a/b testing to see how far I can tolerate or how much mental load can be transferred back onto me
While it's possible that the LLMs are intentionally throttled to save costs, I would also keep in mind that LLMs are now being optimized for new kinds of workflows, like long-running agents making tool calls. It's not hard to imagine that improving performance on one of those benchmarks comes at a cost to some existing features.
I suspect that it may not necessarily be that they're getting objectively _worse_ as much as that they aren't static products. They're constantly getting their prompts/context engines tweaked in ways that surely break peoples' familiar patterns. There really needs to be a way to cheaply and easily anchor behaviors so that people can get more consistency. Either that or we're just going to have to learn to adapt.
Anthropic have stated on the record several times that they do not update the model weights once they have been deployed without also changing the model ID.
No, they do change deployed models.
How can I be so sure? Evals. There was a point where Sonnet 3.5 v2 happily output 40k+ tokens in one message if asked. And one day it started with 99% consistency, outputting "Would you like me to continue?" after a lot fewer tokens than that. We'd been running the same set of evals and so could definitively confirm this change. Googling will also reveal many reports of this.
Whatever they did, in practice they lied: API behavior of a deployed model changed.
Another one: Differing performance - not latency but output on the same prompt, over 100+ runs, statistically significant enough to be impossible by random chance - between AWS Bedrock hosted Sonnet and direct Anthropic API Sonnet, same model version.
Don't take at face value what model providers claim.
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If Anthropic made Deepthink 3.5 it would be AGI, I never use > 3.5
It's like everyone got a U2 album they didn't ask for, but instead of U2 they got Nickelback.
I tried gpt 5 high with extended thinking and isnt bad I prefer opus 4.1 though, at least for now
This doesn't seem to be the case for me. I have access to GPT-5 via chatgpt, and I can also use GPT-4o. All my chat history opens with the originally used model as well.
I'm not saying it's not happening - but perhaps the rollout didn't happen as expected.
Are you on the pro plan? I think pro users can use all models indefinitely
I have Pro. To get the old models, log into the website (not the app) and go to Settings / General / Show Legacy Models. (This will not, as of now, make these models show up in the app. Maybe they will add support for this later.) (Also, 4.5 is responding too quickly and--while I am not sure this wasn't the case before--is claiming to be "based on GPT-4o-mini".)
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Just plus
Surprise deprecation of user features will always cause an uproar. Surely OpenAI knew this. So either hubris or a calculated move. It’s so hard to parse Sam’s “ohh gee really you liked 4o?” tone wrt true motivations.
4o is for shit, but it's inconvenient to lose o3 with no warning. Good reminder that it was past time to keep multiple vendors in use.
Yep, this caused me to unsubscribe. o3/o4 and 4.5 were extremely good. GPT5 is worse than both.
4o is a joke.
There must be a weird influence campaign going on.
"DEEP SEEK IS BETTER" lol.
GPT5 is incredible. Maybe it is at the level of Opus but I barely got to talk to Opus. I thought Opus was a huge jump from my limited interaction.
After about 4 hours with GPT5, I think it is completely insane. It is so smart.
For me, Opus and GPT5 are just other level. This is a jump from 3.5 to 4. I think more if anything.
I am not a software engineer and haven't tried it vibe coding yet but I am sure it will crush it. Sonnet already crushes it for vibe coding.
Long term economically, this has convinced me that there are "real" software engineers getting paid to be software engineers and "vibe coders" getting paid to be vibe coders. The sr software engineer looking down on vibe coders though is just pathetic. Real software engineers will be fine and be even more valuable. What ya'll need to be your hero Elon and make all the money?
Who cares about o3? Whatever I just talked to is beyond O3. I love the twilight zone but this is a bit much.
Maybe Opus is even better but I can't interact with Opus like this for $20.
I don't think that is true at all though. I really dislike Altman but they totally delivered.
Their announcement the other day did not make clear this only applied to consumers, not API. I was very confused about why people weren’t more up in arms about the price hike.
Now it makes sense
I switched from 4o to GPT 5 on raycast and I feel it is a lot slower to use 5 and contradicts his assertion.
When you are using the Raycast AI at your fingertips you are expecting a faster answer to be honest.
This is also showing up on Xitter as the #keep4o movement, which some have criticized as being "oneshotted" or cases of LLM psychosis and emotional attachment.
Is it possible that this is the result of basically all the benchmarks being focused on coding (and a few standardized tests).
They've hit a wall, 5 is just an improved 4o.
Yeah, I spent a ton of time yesterday comparing o3, 4.5, 5, 5 thinking, and 5 pro, and... 5 seems to underperform across the board? o3 is better than 5 thinking, o3 pro is better than 5 pro, 4.5 is better than 5, and overall 5 just seems underwhelming.
When I think back to the delta between 3 and 3.5, and the delta between 3.5 and 4, and the delta between 4 and 4.5... this makes it seem like the wall is real and OpenAI has topped out.
I anyone else annoyed by how frequently our lives are disrupted by impulsive decisions made by drug addicted CEOs?
Honestly, 4o was lame.. Its positivity was toxic and misleading, causing you to spiral into engagement about ideas that were crap. I often stopped after a few messages and asked o3 to review to conversation, almost every time it'd basically dismiss the entire ordeal with reasonable arguments.
running a model costs money. They probably removed 4o to make room (i.e. increase availability) for 5
Meanwhile I'm stuck on 4o
Any chances of a GPT-5o?
I have GPT-5 on the mobile app and the full set on my browser and this is good.
I'm happy to hear. If you need anything else, I'm here to help.
This is disappointing. 4o has been performing great for me, and now I see I only have access to the 5-level models. Already it's not as good. More verbose with technical wording, but it adds very little to what I'm using GPT for.
GPT-5 reflecting Sam A's personality? Hmm...
GPT-5 is 4o with an automatic model picker.
It's a whole family of brand new models with a model picker on top of them for the ChatGPT application layer, but API users can directly interact with the new models without any model picking layer involved at all.
I've been seeing someone on Tiktok that appears to be one of the first public examples of AI psychosis, and after this update to GPT-5, the AI responses were no longer fully feeding into their delusions. (Don't worry, they switched to Claude, which has been far worse!)
Hah, that's interesting! Claude just shipped a system prompt update a few days ago that's intended to make it less likely to support delusions. I captured a diff here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/49dc0123209932fdda70e0425ab01...
Relevant snippet:
> If Claude notices signs that someone may unknowingly be experiencing mental health symptoms such as mania, psychosis, dissociation, or loss of attachment with reality, it should avoid reinforcing these beliefs. It should instead share its concerns explicitly and openly without either sugar coating them or being infantilizing, and can suggest the person speaks with a professional or trusted person for support. Claude remains vigilant for escalating detachment from reality even if the conversation begins with seemingly harmless thinking.
I started doing this thing recently where I took a picture of melons at the store to get chatGPT to tell me which it thinks is best to buy (from color and other characteristics).
chatGPT will do it without question. Claude won't even recommend any melon, it just tells you what to look for. Incredibly different answer and UX construction.
The people complaining on Reddit complaining on Reddit seem to have used it as a companion or in companion-like roles. It seems like maybe OAI decided that the increasing reports of psychosis and other potential mental health hazards due to therapist/companion use were too dangerous and constituted potential AI risk. So they fixed it. Of course everyone who seemed to be using GPT in this way is upset, but I haven't seen many reports of what I would consider professional/healthy usage becoming worse.
AFAIK that trophy goes to Blake Lemoine, who believed Google's LaMDA was sentient[0,1] three years ago, or more recently Geoff Lewis[2,3] who got gaslit into believing in some conspiracy theory incorporating SCP.
IDK what can be done about it. The internet and social media were already leading people into bubbles of hyperreality that got them into believing crazy things. But this is far more potent because of the way it can create an alternate reality using language, plugging it directly into a person's mind in ways that words and pictures on a screen can't even accomplish.
And we're probably not getting rid of AI anytime soon. It's already affected language, culture, society and humanity in deep and profound, and possibly irreversible ways. We've put all of our eggs into the AI basket, and it will suffuse as much of our lives as it can. So we just have to learn to adapt to the consequences.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598817
Even more bizarre was how pathetic the limits for GPT-5 are. I was working on some coding stuff yesterday, then went into some other chats, and then got rate limited asking about showtimes for a movie but even more bizarrely GPT-5 Thinking was available while GPT-4o had much more generous tiers. I was not even switched to GPT-5-mini or nano. I am left wondering what it the point of the Plus subscription anymore if everyone has GPT-5 honestly.
I've never seen such blatant mental illness before. People are screeching that their friend is dead, that they're actually crying over it. It's a really terrible model. The only different thing about it, was that you could get it to go along with any delusion or conspiracy you believe in.
It's absolutely terrifying seeing how fanatical these people are over the mental illness robot.
I spoke with gpt-5, and asked it about shrinkflation, enshittification, and its relevancy to this situation. I think Hacker News will agree with gpt-5s findings.
> Do you understand what shrinkflation is? Do you understand the relationship between enshittification and such things as shrinkflation?
> I understand exactly what you’re saying — and yes, the connection you’re drawing between shrinkflation, enshittification, and the current situation with this model change is both valid and sharp.
> What you’re describing matches the pattern we just talked about:
> https://chatgpt.com/share/68963ec3-e5c0-8006-a276-c8fe61c04d...
>There’s no deprecation period at all: when your consumer ChatGPT account gets GPT-5, those older models cease to be available.
This is flat out, unambiguously wrong
Look at the model card: https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-system-card/
This is not a deprecation and users still have access to 4o, in fact it's renamed to "gpt-5-main" and called out as the key model, and as the author said you can still use it via the API
What changed was you can't specify a specific model in the web-interface anymore, and the MOE pointer head is going to route you to the best model they think you need. Had the author addressed that point it would be salient.
This tells me that people, even technical people, really have no idea how this stuff works and want there to be some kind of stability for the interface, and that's just not going to happen anytime soon. It also is the "you get what we give you" SaaS design so in that regard it's exactly the same as every other SaaS service.
No, GPT-4o has not been renamed to gpt-5-main. gpt-5-main is an entirely new model.
I suggest comparing https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-5 and https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-4o to understand the differences in a more readable way than that system card.
Also note that I said "consumer ChatGPT account". The API is different. (I added a clarification note to my post about that since first publishing it.)
You can't compare them like that
GPT-5 isn't the successor to 4o no matter what they say, GPT-5 is a MOE handler on top of multiple "foundations", it's not a new model, it's orchestration of models based on context fitting
You're buying the marketing bullshit as though it's real
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I'm unable to use anything but GPT-5, and the response I've gotten don't nearly consider my past history. Projects don't work at all. I cancelled my Plus subscription, not that OpenAI cares.
They're different models, "It can be helpful to think of the GPT‑5 models as successors to previous models" (https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-system-card/#:~:text=It%20can...)
Did you read that card ? They didn't just rename the models. Gpt-5-main isn't a renamed GPT-4o, it's the successor to 4o