> For the first time, GPT‑5.1 Instant can use adaptive reasoning to decide when to think before responding to more challenging questions, resulting in more thorough and accurate answers, while still responding quickly. This is reflected in significant improvements on math and coding evaluations like AIME 2025 and Codeforces.
My second response was sassier than it should have been. Sorry for that. I'm not making any claims about whether or not GPT implemented this. My point was narrower in a way that is probably annoying: you asked why you were being downvoted; I tried to explain that, as far as I could tell, the adaptive system you explicitly described (regardless of what adaptive reasoning actually is), where humans choose the reasoning level, isn't the one that the paper proposes -- and that this may be one of the reasons for the downvotes.
I don't know whether that's why anybody downvoted you, but I think that's probably part of the reason. On the other hand, the Hacker News guidelines ask us to respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment or post. In that spirit, just as you could have said something to the effect of "Yep, AI researchers learned from behavioral economics and research into human decision making and here's where OpenAI mentions it," I could have said just "the relevance may not be that it's a new idea but rather that it's a neat idea, to the person posting it at least. Maybe someone who knows AI systems more deeply wouldn't find it interesting. I do though!" That's a bit of hypocrisy on my part, I think.
Anyhow, for the record, yep, I knew of adaptive reasoning, but, no, I didn't know that it matched what this paper proposes so closely. Thanks for the correction!
> For the first time, GPT‑5.1 Instant can use adaptive reasoning to decide when to think before responding to more challenging questions, resulting in more thorough and accurate answers, while still responding quickly. This is reflected in significant improvements on math and coding evaluations like AIME 2025 and Codeforces.
https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-1/
It says literally the thing you wanted from system 2. Its almost exactly that.
This is what you said btw:
"it's that the system itself decides how to reason based on the nature of the problem it faces"
My second response was sassier than it should have been. Sorry for that. I'm not making any claims about whether or not GPT implemented this. My point was narrower in a way that is probably annoying: you asked why you were being downvoted; I tried to explain that, as far as I could tell, the adaptive system you explicitly described (regardless of what adaptive reasoning actually is), where humans choose the reasoning level, isn't the one that the paper proposes -- and that this may be one of the reasons for the downvotes.
I don't know whether that's why anybody downvoted you, but I think that's probably part of the reason. On the other hand, the Hacker News guidelines ask us to respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment or post. In that spirit, just as you could have said something to the effect of "Yep, AI researchers learned from behavioral economics and research into human decision making and here's where OpenAI mentions it," I could have said just "the relevance may not be that it's a new idea but rather that it's a neat idea, to the person posting it at least. Maybe someone who knows AI systems more deeply wouldn't find it interesting. I do though!" That's a bit of hypocrisy on my part, I think.
Anyhow, for the record, yep, I knew of adaptive reasoning, but, no, I didn't know that it matched what this paper proposes so closely. Thanks for the correction!