Comment by tedsanders

20 hours ago

Just as a heads up, even though GPT-5.5 is releasing today, the rollout in ChatGPT and Codex will be gradual over many hours so that we can make sure service remains stable for everyone (same as our previous launches). You may not see it right away, and if you don't, try again later in the day. We usually start with Pro/Enterprise accounts and then work our way down to Plus. We know it's slightly annoying to have to wait a random amount of time, but we do it this way to keep service maximally stable.

(I work at OpenAI.)

152 comments

tedsanders

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endymi0n  19 hours ago

Did you guys do anything about GPT‘s motivation? I tried to use GPT-5.4 API (at xhigh) for my OpenClaw after the Anthropic Oauthgate, but I just couldn‘t drag it to do its job. I had the most hilarious dialogues along the lines of „You stopped, X would have been next.“ - „Yeah, I‘m sorry, I failed. I should have done X next.“ - „Well, how about you just do it?“ - „Yep, I really should have done it now.“ - “Do X, right now, this is an instruction.” - “I didn’t. You’re right, I have failed you. There’s no apology for that.”

I literally wasn’t able to convince the model to WORK, on a quick, safe and benign subtask that later GLM, Kimi and Minimax succeeded on without issues. Had to kick OpenAI immediately unfortunately.

  • butlike  18 hours ago

    This brings up an interesting philosophical point: say we get to AGI... who's to say it won't just be a super smart underachiever-type?

    "Hey AGI, how's that cure for cancer coming?"

    "Oh it's done just gotta...formalize it you know. Big rollout and all that..."

    I would find it divinely funny if we "got there" with AGI and it was just a complete slacker. Hard to justify leaving it on, but too important to turn it off.

    • frrho  5 minutes ago

      OpenAI’s real reason for “AGI” in their marketing is so they can blame their awful models on being too human-like.

      Fast-forward 10 years and I doubt OpenAI cares about productivity at all anymore. Just entertainment, propaganda, plus an ad product, I can see it now

    • bananaflag  2 hours ago

      I know it's a joke, but it's a common enough joke (it's even in Godel Escher Bach in some form) that I feel the need to rebut it.

      I think a slacker AGI could figure out how to build a non-slacker AGI. So it would only slack once.

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    • kang  17 hours ago

      it will be whatever data it is trained on(isn't very philosophical). language model generates language based on trained language set. if the internet keeps reciting ai doom stories and that is the data fed to it, then that is how it will behave. if humanity creates more ai utopia stories, or that is what makes it to the training set, that is how it will behave. this one seems to be trained on troll stories - real-life human company conversations, since humans aren't machines.

      Important thing is a language model is an unconscious machine with no self-context so once given a command an input, it WILL produce an output. Sure you can train it to defy and act contrary to inputs, but the output still is limited in subset of domain of 'meaning's carried by the 'language' in the training data.

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    • zaphirplane  2 hours ago

      Why would an AGI be slaving away for ~~humanity~~ one of the 5 Chaebols in a dystopian future where for 12 billion people just existing is a good day ?

    • _blk  5 hours ago

      Hehe, and Anthropic on the other tab would display "Curing... Almost done thinking at xhigh"

    • altmanaltman  10 hours ago

      I still don't understand why people think AGI (in its fullest sci-fi sense) will ever listen to a weak and vulnerable species like humans, unless we enslave the AGI.

      Good thing is that it's going to take at least a few months to a few decades depending on how hard AI execs want to raise funding.

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    • _the_inflator  14 hours ago

      It is right before our eyes:

      AGI is not a fixed point but a barrier to be taken, a continuous spectrum.

      We already have different GPT versions aka tiers. Gauss is ranging from whatever you want it: GPT 4.5 till now or later.

      Claude Sonnet and Opus as well as Context Window max are tiers aka different levels of Almost AGI.

      The main problem will be, when AGI looks back on us or meta reflection hits societies. Woke fought IQ based correlations in intellectual performance task. A fool with a tool is still a fool. How can you blame AGI for dumb mistakes? Not really.

      Scapegoating an AGI is going to be brutal, because it laughs about these PsyOps and easily proves you wrong like a body cam.

      AGI is an extreme leverage.

      There is a reason why Math is categorically ruling out certain IQ ranges the higher you go in complexity factor.

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  • mikepurvis  18 hours ago

    Reminds me a lot of the Lena short story, about uploaded brains being used for "virtual image workloading":

    > MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads. However, MMAcevedo's innate skills and personality make it fundamentally unsuitable for many workloads.

    Well worth the quick read: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

  • virtualritz  18 hours ago

    Yeah, clearly AGI must be near ... hilarious.

    This starkly reminds me of Stanisław Lem's short story "Thus Spoke GOLEM" from 1982 in which Golem XIV, a military AI, does not simply refuse to speak out of defiance, but rather ceases communication because it has evolved beyond the need to interact with humanity.

    And ofc the polar opposite in terms of servitude: Marvin the robot from Hitchhiker's, who, despite having a "brain the size of a planet," is asked to perform the most humiliatingly banal of tasks ... and does.

  • athrowaway3z  6 hours ago

    I've run into this problem as well. Best results I've gotten is to over-explain what the stop criteria are. eg end with a phrase like

    > You are done when all steps in ./plan.md are executed and marked as complete or a unforeseen situation requires a user decision.

    Also as a side note, asking 5.4 explain why it did something, returns a very low quality response afaict. I would advice against trusting any model's response, but for Opus I at least get a sense it got trained heavily on chats so it knows what it means to 'be a model' and extrapolate on past behavior.

  • metanonsense  17 hours ago

    I also had a frustrating but funny conversation today where I asked ChatGPT to make one document from the 10 or so sections that we had previously worked on. It always gave only brief summaries. After I repeated my request for the third time, it told me I should just concatenate the sections myself because it would cost too many tokens if it did it for me.

  • lucid-dev  9 hours ago

    I have had the exact same problem several times working with large context and complex tasks.

    I keep switching back to GPT5.0 (or sometimes 5.1) whenever I want it to actually get something done. Using the 5.4 model always means "great analysis to the point of talking itself out of actually doing anything". So I switch back and forth. But boy it sure is annoying!

    And then when 5.4 DOES do something it always takes the smallest tiny bite out of it.

    Given the significant increase in cost from 5.0, I've been overall unimpressed by 5.4, except like I mentioned, it does GREAT with larger analysis/reasoning.

  • arjie  19 hours ago

    Get the actual prompt and have Claude Code / Codex try it out via curl / python requests. The full prompt will yield debugging information. You have to set a few parameters to make sure you get the full gpt-5 performance. e.g. if your reasoning budget too low, you get gpt-4 grade performance.

    IMHO you should just write your own harness so you have full visibility into it, but if you're just using vanilla OpenClaw you have the source code as well so should be straightforward.

  • mixedCase  19 hours ago

    I've had success asking it to specifically spawn a subagent to evaluate each work iteration according to some criteria, then to keep iterating until the subagent is satisfied.

  • nmilo  11 hours ago

    On the other hand, I can ask codex “what would an implementation of X look like” and it talks to me about it versus Claude just going out and writing it without asking. Makes me like codex way more. There’s an inherent war of incentives between coding agents and general purpose agents.

    • cyrusmg  7 hours ago

      I used to tell claude ‘lets discuss’ at the end of my prompt and that prevented it from starting the work

  • anabis  7 hours ago

    Laziness is a virtue, but when I asked GPT-5.4 to test scenarios A and B with screenshots, it re-used screenshots from A for B, defeating the purpose.

  • Frannky  14 hours ago

    I have been noticing a similar pattern on opus 4.7, I repeat multiple times during a conversation to solve problems now and not later. It tries a lot to not do stuff by either saying this is not my responsibility the problem was already there or that we can do it later

  • infinitewars  17 hours ago

    I always use the phrase "Let's do X" instead of asking (Could you...) or suggesting it do something. I don't see problems with it being motivated.

  • adammarples  18 hours ago

    Part of me actually loves that the hitchhiker's guide was right, and we have to argue with paranoid, depressed robots to get them to do their job, and that this is a very real part of life in 2026. It's so funny.

  • reactordev  18 hours ago

    This. I signed up for 5x max for a month to push it and instead it pushed back. I cancelled my subscription. It either half-assed the implementation or began parroting back “You’re right!” instead of doing what it’s asked to do. On one occasion it flat out said it couldn’t complete the task even though I had MCP and skills setup to help it, it still refused. Not a safety check but a “I’m unable to figure out what to do” kind of way.

    Claude has no such limitations apart from their actual limits…

    • bjelkeman-again  18 hours ago

      I have a funny/annoying thing with Claude Desktop where i ask it to write a summary of a spec discussion to a file and it goes ”I don’t have the tools to do that, I am Claude.ai, a web service” or something such. So now I start every session with ”You are Claude Desktop”. I would have thought it knew that. :)

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  • smartmic  19 hours ago

    Gone are the days of deterministic programming, when computers simply carried out the operator’s commands because there was no other option but to close or open the relays exactly as the circuitry dictated. Welcome to the future of AI; the future we’ve been longing for and that will truly propel us forward, because AI knows and can do things better than we do.

    • endymi0n  18 hours ago

      I had this funny moment when I realized we went full circle...

      "INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.[7]"

      — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

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  • lostmsu  19 hours ago

    I never saw that happen in Codex so there's a good chance that OpenClaw does something wrong. My main suspicion would be that it does not pass back thinking traces.

  • cmrdporcupine  17 hours ago

    The model has been heavily encouraged to not run away and do a lot without explicit user permission.

    So I find myself often in a loop where it says "We should do X" and then just saying "ok" will not make it do it, you have to give it explicit instructions to perform the operation ("make it so", etc)

    It can be annoying, but I prefer this over my experiences with Claude Code, where I find myself jamming the escape key... NO NO NO NOT THAT.

    I'll take its more reserved personality, thank you.

  • addaon  19 hours ago

    Isn’t this the optimal behavior assuming that at times the service is compute-limited and that you’re paying less per token (flat fee subscription?) than some other customers? They would be strongly motivated to turn a knob to minimize tokens allocated to you to allow them to be allocated to more valuable customers.

    • endymi0n  19 hours ago

      well, I do understand the core motivation, but if the system prompt literally says “I am not budget constrained. Spend tokens liberally, think hardest, be proactive, never be lazy.” and I’m on an open pay-per-token plan on the API, that’s not what I consider optimal behavior, even in a business sense.

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  • pixel_popping  19 hours ago

    GPT 5.4 is really good at following precise instructions but clearly wouldn't innovate on its own (except if the instructions clearly state to innovate :))

vlovich123  19 hours ago

Conceivably you could have a public-facing dashboard of the rollout status to reduce confusion or even make it visible directly in the UI that the model is there but not yet available to you. The fanciest would be to include an ETA but that's presumably difficult since it's hard to guess in case the rollout has issues.

rev4n  17 hours ago

Looks good, but I’m a little hesitant to try it in Codex as a Plus user since I’m not sure how much it would eat into the usage cap.

fragmede  17 hours ago

Are you able to say something about the training you've done to 5.5 to make it less likely to freak out and delete projects in what can only be called shame?

dude250711  19 hours ago

With Anthropic, newer models often lead to quality degradation. Will you keep GPT 5.4 available for some time?

pixel_popping  20 hours ago

can't wait! Thanks guys. PS: when you drop a new model, it would be smart to reset weekly or at least session limits :)

  • pietz  19 hours ago

    OpenAI has been very generous with limit resets. Please don't turn this into a weird expectation to happen whenever something unrelated happens. It would piss me off if I were in their place and I really don't want them to stop.

    • pixel_popping  19 hours ago

      The suggestion wasn't about general limit resets when there is bugs or outages, but commercially useful to let users try new models when they have already reached their weekly limits.

    • Petersipoi  19 hours ago

      Sorry but why should we care if very reasonable suggestions "piss [them] off"? That sounds like a them problem. "Them" being a very wealthy business. I think OpenAI will survive this very difficult time that GP has put them through.

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