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Comment by andy99

7 months ago

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.

228 comments

andy99

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corysama  7 months ago

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.

  • rpeden  7 months ago

    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.

    • skerit  7 months ago

      A lot of people use LLMs for fiction & role playing. Do you know of a place where some of these interactions are shared? The only ones I've found so far are, well, over-the-top sexual in nature.

      And I'm just kind of interested _how_ other people are doing all of this interactive fiction stuff.

      4 replies →

    • pera  7 months ago

      I am not sure which heartless comments you are referring to but what I do see is genuine concern for the mental health of individuals who seem to be overly attached, on a deep emotional level, to an LLM: That does not look good at all.

      Just a few days ago another person on that subreddit was explaining how they used ChatGPT to talk to a simulated version of their dad, who recently passed away. At the same time there are reports that may indicate LLMs triggering actual psychosis to some users (https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/delusions-b...).

      Given the loneliness epidemic there are obvious commercial reasons to make LLMs feel like your best pal, which may result in these vulnerable individuals getting more isolated and very addicted to a tech product.

      5 replies →

    • alvis  7 months ago

      Personally, I prefer GPT-5 than 4o. It does a good job. But like many others I don't like the sudden removal because it also removed O3, which I sometime use for research based task. GPT-5 thinking mode is okay, but I feel O3 is still better.

    • thrown-0825  7 months ago

      Then you learned a valuable lesson about relying on hidden features of a tech product to support a niche use case.

      Carry it forward into your next experience with OpenAI.

      2 replies →

  • jelder  7 months ago

    Well, good, because these things make bad friends and worse therapists.

    • resource_waste  7 months ago

      Well, like, thats just your opinion man.

      And probably close to wrong if we are looking at the sheer scale of use.

      There is a bit of reality denial among anti-AI people. I thought about why people don't adjust to this new reality. I know one of my friends was anti-AI and seems to continue to be because his reputation is a bit based on proving he is smart. Another because their job is at risk.

  • hirvi74  7 months ago

    > "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.

  • michaelbrave  7 months ago

    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.

    • corysama  7 months ago

      There is certainly a market/hobby opportunity for "discount AI" for no-revenue creative tasks. A lot of r/LocalLLaMA/ is focused on that area and in squeezing the best results out of limited hardware. Local is great if you already have a 24 GB gaming GPU. But, maybe there's an opportunity for renting out low power GPUs for casual creative work. Or, an opportunity for a RenderToken-like community of GPU sharing.

      5 replies →

    • torginus  7 months ago

      I mean - I 'm quite sure it's going to be available via API, and you can still do your worldbuilding if you're willing to go to places like OpenRouter.

  • oceanplexian  7 months ago

    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.

  • Jenk  7 months ago

    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.

  • hn_throwaway_99  7 months ago

    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.

  • alecsm  7 months ago

    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.

  • TZubiri  7 months ago

    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

  • tibbar  7 months ago

    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.

    • yawnxyz  7 months ago

      the classic 3rd space problem that Starbucks tackled; they initially wanted people to hang out and do work there, but grew to hate it so they started adding lots of little things to dissuade people from spending too much time there

      1 reply →

  • mvieira38  7 months ago

    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

  • Alex3917  7 months ago

    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.

waldrews  7 months ago

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).

  • waynesonfire  7 months ago

    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:

    • simonw  7 months ago

      The GPT-4o you talk to through ChatGPT and the GPT-4o you access via the API are different models... but they're actually both available via the API.

      https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-4o is gpt-4o in the API, also available as three date-stamped snapshots: gpt-4o-2024-11-20 and gpt-4o-2024-08-06 and gpt-4o-2024-05-13 - priced at $2.50/million input and $10.00/million output.

      https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/chatgpt-4o-latest is chatgpt-4o-latest in the API. This is the model used by ChatGPT 4o, and it doesn't provide date-stamped snapshots: the model is updated on a regular basis without warning. It costs $5/million input and $15/million output.

      If you use the same system prompt as ChatGPT (from one of the system prompt leaks) with that chatgpt-4o-latest alias you should theoretically get the same experience.

    • grues-dinner  7 months ago

      > 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.

      But how sure are you that GPT-5 even had this data, and if it has it, it's accurate? This isn't information OpenAI has publicly divulged and it's ingested from scraped data, so either OpenAI told it what to say in this case, or it's making it up.

  • andy99  7 months ago

    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.

    • svachalek  7 months ago

      Not everyone is an engineer. There's a substantial population that were selecting for maximum sycophancy.

    • dragonwriter  7 months ago

      > 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.

      The same tradeoffs (except cost, because that's roled into the plan not a factor when selecting on the interface) exist on ChatGPT, which is an app built on the underlying model like any other.

      So getting rid of models that are stronger in some areas when adding a new one that is cheaper (presuming API costs also reflect cost to provide) has the same kinds of impacts on existing ChatGPT users established usages as it would have on a businesses established apps except that the ChatGPT users don't see a cost savings along with any disruption in how they were used to things working.

    • Espressosaurus  7 months ago

      Different models have different (daily/weekly) limits and are better at different things.

      o3 was for a self-contained problem I wanted to have chewed on for 15 minutes and then spit out a plausible solution (small weekly limit I think?)

      o4-mini for general coding (daily limits)

      o4-mini-high for coding when o4-mini isn't doing the job (weekly limits)

      4o for pooping on (unlimited, but IMO only marginally useful)

hinkley  7 months ago

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?

scarface_74  7 months ago

Companies testing their apps would be using the API not the ChatGPT app. The models are still available via the API.

dbreunig  7 months ago

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.)

kazinator  7 months ago

> 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.

dragonwriter  7 months ago

> 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.

  • nickthegreek  7 months ago

    > 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.

  • trashface  7 months ago

    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.

jimbokun  7 months ago

> 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.

augergine  7 months ago

[flagged]

  • MatejKafka  7 months ago

    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.

    • LexiMax  7 months ago

      There is a lot more groupthink and echo chamber behavior on HN compared to Reddit due to the way flagging works. For me, HN is unusable without using showdead and using the active front page so I can see what stories its userbase tried to flag off the normal front page.

      You can also say some pretty horrendous things on this site as long as you couch it in modest proposed-esque soft language. If I want to have a non-technical conversation with other human beings, Tildes blows the doors off of HN in the empathy department.