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.
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.
I have some science-fiction story ideas I'd love to flesh out. However, it turns out that I'm a terrible writer, despite some practice at it. Also, I can never be surprised by my own writing, or entertained by it in the same way that someone else's writing can.
I've tried taking my vague story ideas, throwing them at an AI, and getting half a chapter out to see how it tracks.
Unfortunately, few if any models can write prose as good as a skilled human author, so I'm still waiting to see if a future model can output customised stories on demand that I'd actually enjoy.
Sure. Here is the fanfiction book I've been using LLMs to help me write. Helps a lot with improving prose and identifying plot holes. It's much better then a rubber duck for talking out how to improve a chapter and write plausible story arcs. It's not great at word smithing, but I find it errs on the side of too many similies and metaphors, so I just delete some of them as I copy the suggestions over into my draft.
Thank you for your feedback. I've rewritten the "Forward" to apply your suggestions and will keep them in mind when writing and improving chapters in the future.
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.
The place we still call America for illogical reasons is a broken society in seemingly finals stages of its existence. Of course broken people will glom onto yet another digital form of a drug that gives an impression of at least suppressing the pain they feel for reasons they do not understand.
It is little more than the Rat Park Experiment, only in this American version, the researchers think giving more efficient and various ways of delivering morphine water is how you make a rat park.
I don't live in this broken place you speak of and don't feel the pain you mention.
Outside of work I sometimes user LLMs to create what amounts to infinitely variable Choose Your Own Adventure books just for entertainment, and I don't think that's a problem.
Yes. I understand that. Most of us are totally detached and solely unaware of what goes on outside of the bubble we are in. Very few of us actually try to find out what is going outside of the walls of Versailles.
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.
The number of comments in the thread talking about 4o as if it were their best friend the shared all their secrets with is concerning. Lotta lonely folks out there
Perhaps if somebody were to shut down your favourite online shooter without warning you'd be upset, angry and passionate about it.
Some people like myself fall into this same category, we know its a token generator under the hood, but the duality is it's also entertainment in the shape of something that acts like a close friend.
We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.
This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky - hobby horsing, ham radio, cosplay etc etc.
> We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.
> This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky
It is quite different, and you yourself explained why: some people can’t see the distinction between ChatGPT being a token generator or an intelligent friend. People aren’t talking about the latter being “odd or geeky” but being dangerous and harmful.
I would never get so invested in something I didn’t control.
They may stop making new episodes of a favoured tv show, or writing new books, but the old ones will not suddenly disappear.
How can you shut down cosplay? I guess you could pass a law banning ham radio or owning a horse, but that isn’t sudden in democratic countries, it takes months if not years.
Gamers threaten all kinds of things when features of their favorite games changes. Including depth threats to developers and threats of self harm and suicide.
Not every gaming subculture is healthy one. Plenty are pretty toxic.
I'm kind of surprised it got that bad for people, but I think it's a good sign that even if we're far from AGI or luxury fully automated space communism robots, the profound (negative) social impacts of these chat bots are already kind of inflicting on the world are real and very troublesome.
AI safety is focused on AGI but maybe it should be focused on how little “artificial intelligence” it takes to send people completely off the rails. We could barely handle social media, LLMs seem to be too much.
I think it's an canary in a coal mine, and the true writing is already on the wall. People that are using AI like in the post above us are likely not stupid people. I think those people truly want love and connection in their lives, and for some reason or another, they are unable to obtain such.
I have the utmost confidence that things are only going to get worse from here. The world is becoming more isolated and individualistic as time progresses.
I can understand that. I’ve had long periods in my life where I’ve desired that - I’d argue probably I’m in one now. But it’s not real, it can’t possibly perform that function. It seems like it borders on some kind of delusion to use these tools for that.
It does, but it's more that the delusion is obvious, compared to other delusions that are equally delusional - like the ones about the importance of celebrities, soap opera plots, entertainment-adjacent dramas, and quite a lot of politics and economics.
Unlike those celebrities, you can have a conversation with it.
Which makes it the ultimate parasocial product - the other kind of Turing completeness.
Isn't the ELIZA-Effect specific to computer programs?
Seeing human-like traits in pets or plants is a much trickier subject than seeing them in what is ultimate a machine developed entirely separately from the evolution of living organisms.
We simply don't know what its like to be a plant or a pet. We can't say they definitely have human-like traits, but we similarly can't rule it out. Some of the uncertainty is in the fact that we do share ancestors at some point, and our biology's aren't entirely distinct. The same isn't true when comparing humans and computer programs.
The same vague arguments apply to computers. We know computers can reason, and reasoning is an important part of our intelligence and consciousness. So even for ELIZA, or even more so for LLMs, we can't entirely rule out that they may have aspects of consciousness.
You can also more or less apply the same thing to rocks, too, since we're all made up of the same elements ultimately - and maybe even empty space with its virtual particles is somewhat conscious. It's just a bad argument, regardless of where you apply it, not a complex insight.
That's an instance of slippery slope fallacy at the end. Mammals share so much more evolutionary history with us than rocks that, yes, it justifies for example ascribing them an inner subjective world, even though we will never know how it is to be a cat from a cat's perspective. Sometimes quantitative accumulation does lead to qualitative jumps.
Also worth noting is that alongside the very human propensity to anthropomorphize, there's the equally human, but opposite tendency to deny animals those higher capacities we pride ourselves with. Basically a narcissistic impulse to set ourselves apart from our cousins we'd like to believe we've left completely behind. Witness the recurring surprise when we find yet another proof that things are not by far that cut-and-dry.
Do you have any examples? I've noticed something similar with memes and slang, they'll sometimes popularize an existing old word that wasn't too common before. This is my first time hearing AI might be doing it.
I've seen it a lot in older people's writing in different cultures before trump became relevant. It's either all caps or bold for some words in middle of sentence. Seems to be pronounced more in those who have aged less gracefully in terms of mental ability (not trying to make any implication, just my observation) but maybe it's just a generational thing.
I've seen this pattern ape'd by a lot of younger people in the Trumpzone, so maybe it has its origins in the older dementia patients, but it has been adopted as the tone and writing style of the authoritarian right.
That type of writing has been in the tabloid press in the U.K. for decades, especially the section that aims more at older people, and that currently (and for a good 15 years) skews heavily to the populist right.
Nah Trump has a very obvious cadence to his speech / writing patterns that has essentially become part of his brand, so much so that you can easily train LLM's to copy it.
It reads more like angry grandpa chain mail with a "healthy" dose of dementia than what you would typically associate with terminally online micro cultures you see on reddit/tiktok/4chan.
oh god, this is some real authentic dystopia right here
these things are going to end up in android bots in 10 years too
(honestly, I wouldn't mind a super smart, friendly bot in my old age that knew all my quirks but was always helpful... I just would not have a full-on relationship with said entity!)
I don't know how else to describe this than sad and cringe. At least people obsessed with owning multiple cats were giving their affection to something that theoretically can love you back.
Just because AI is different doesn't mean it's "sad and cringe". You sound like how people viewed online friendships in the 90's. It's OK. Real friends die or change and people have to cope with that. People imagine their dead friends are still somehow around (heaven, ghost, etc.) when they're really not. It's not all that different.
That entire AI boyfriend subreddit feels like some sort of insane asylum dystopia to me. It's not just people cosplaying or writing fanfic. It's people saying they got engaged to their AI boyfriends ("OMG, I can't believe I'm calling him my fiance now!"), complete with physical rings. Artificial intimacy to the nth degree. I'm assuming a lot of those posts are just creative writing exercises but in the past 15 years or so my thoughts of "people can't really be that crazy" when I read batshit stuff online have consistently been proven incorrect.
Just because it's strange and different doesn't mean it's insanity. I likened it to pets because of the grief but there's also religion. People are weird and even true two-way social relationships don't really make a lot of sense practically, other than to feed some primal emotional needs which pets, AI boyfriends, OF and gods all sort of do too. Perhaps some of these things are still helpful, despite being "inasnity" while others might be harmful. Maybe that's the distinction you're seeing, but it's not clear which is which.
It's sad but is it really "cringe"? Can the people have nothing? Why can't we have a chat bot to bs with? Many of us are lonely, miserable but also not really into making friends irl.
It shouldn't be so much of an ask to at least give people language models to chat with.
What you're asking for feels akin to feeding a hungry person chocolate cake and nothing else. Yeah maybe it feels nice, but if you just keep eating chocolate cake, obviously bad shit happens. Something else needs to be fixed, but just (I don't want to even call it band-aiding because it's more akin to doing drugs IMO) coping with a chatbot only really digs the hole deeper.
Make sure they get local models to run offline. That they rely on a virtual friend in the cloud, beyond their control and that can disappear or change personality in an instant makes this even more sad. That would also allow the chats to be truly anonymous and avoid companies abusing data collected by spying on what those people are telling their "friends".
I am not confident most, if any of them, are even real.
If they are real, then what kind of help there could be for something like this? Perhaps, community? But sadly, we've basically all but destroyed those. Pills likely won't treat this, and I cannot imagine trying to convince someone to go to therapy for a worse and more expensive version of what ChatGPT already provides them.
They don't even have to be "cooked", people generally are pretty similar which is why common scams works so well at a large scale.
All AI has to be is mildly but not overly sycophantic and as a supporter/cheerleader to someone, or who affirms your beliefs. Most people like that quality in a partner or friend. I actually want to recognize OAI courage in deprecating 4 because of it sycophancy. Generally I don't think getting people addicted to flattery or model personalities is good
Several times I've had people speak about interpersonal arguments and them having felt vindication when chatgpt takes their side, I cringe but it's not my place to tell them chatgpt is meant to be mostly agreeable.
It seems outrageous that a company whose purported mission is centered on AI safety is catering to a crowd whose use case is virtual boyfriend or pseudo-therapy.
Maybe AI... shouldn't be convenient to use for such purposes.
I weep for humanity. This is satire right? On the flip side I guess you could charge these users more to keep 4o around because they're definitely going to pay.
Which is a bit frightening because a lot of the r/ChatGPT comments strike me as unhinged - it's like you would have thought that OpenAI murdered their puppy or something.
Anyone that remembers the reaction when Sydney from Microsoft or more recently Maya from Sesame losing their respective 'personality' can easily see how product managers are going to have to start paying attention to the emotional impact of changing or shutting down models.
I think the fickle "personality" of these systems is a clue to how the entity supposedly possessing a personality doesn't really exist in the the first place.
Stories are being performed at us, and we're encouraged to imagine characters have a durable existence.
For example, keep the same model, but change the early document (prompt) from stuff like "AcmeBot is a kind and helpful machine" to "AcmeBot revels in human suffering."
Users will say "AcmeBot's personality changed!" and they'll be half-right and half-wrong in the same way.
I'm not sure why you think this is just a prompt thing. It's not. Sycophancy is a problem with GPT-4o, whatever magic incantations you provide. On the flip side, Sydney, was anything but sycophantic and was more than happy to literally ignore users wholesale or flip out on them from time to time. I mean just think about it for a few seconds. If eliminating this behavior was as easy as Microsoft changing the early document, why not just do that and be done with it ?
The document or whatever you'd like to call it is only one part of the story.
I'm not sure why you think-I-think it's just a prompt thing.
I brought up prompts as a convenient way to demonstrate that a magic-trick is being performed, not because prompts are the only way for the magician to run into trouble with the illusion. It's sneaky, since it's a trick homo narrans play on ourselves all the time.
> The document or whatever you'd like to call it is only one part of the story.
Everybody knows that the weights matter. That's why we get stories where the sky is generally blue instead of magenta.
That's separate from the distinction between the mind (if any) of an LLM-author versus the mind (firmly fictional, even if possibly related) that we impute when seeing the output (narrated or acted) of a particular character.
LLMs have default personalities - shaped by RLHF and other post-training methods. There is a lot of variance to it, but variance from one LLM to another is much higher than that within the same LLM.
If you want an LLM to retain the same default personality, you pretty much have to use an open weights model. That's the only way to be sure it wouldn't be deprecated or updated without your knowledge.
I'd argue that's "underlying hidden authorial style" as opposed to what most people mean when they refer to the "personality" of the thing they were "chatting with."
Consider the implementation: There's document with "User: Open the pod bay doors, HAL" followed by an incomplete "HAL-9000: ", and the LLM is spun up to suggest what would "fit" to round out the document. Non-LLM code parses out HAL-9000's line and "performs" it at you across an internet connection.
Whatever answer you get, that "personality" is mostly from how the document(s) described HAL-9000 and similar characters, as opposed to a self-insert by the ego-less name-less algorithm that makes documents longer.
Or they could just do it whenever they want to for whatever reason they want to. They are not responsible for the mental health of their users. Their users are responsible for that themselves.
Depends on what business OpenAI wants to be in. If they want to be in the business of selling AI to companies. Then "firing" the consumer customers that want someone to talk to, and double down models that are useful for work. Can be a wise choice.
Unless you want to improve your ratio of paid-to-free users and change your userbase in the process. They're pissing off free users, but pros who use the paid version might like this new version better.
Yeah it’s really bad over there. Like when a website changes its UI and people prefer the older look… except they’re acting like the old look was a personal friend who died.
I think LLMs are amazing technology but we’re in for really weird times as people become attached to these things.
I mean, I don’t mind the Claude 3 funeral. It seems like it was a fun event.
I’m less worried about the specific complaints about model deprecation, which can be ‘solved’ for those people by not deprecating the models (obviously costs the AI firms). I’m more worried about AI-induced psychosis.
An analogy I saw recently that I liked: when a cat sees a laser pointer, it is a fun thing to chase. For dogs it is sometimes similar and sometimes it completely breaks the dog’s brain and the dog is never the same again. I feel like AI for us may be more like laser pointers for dogs, and some among us are just not prepared to handle these kinds of AI interactions in a healthy way.
There are lots of physiological signs that dogs are capable of proto-empathy, that dogs and humans engage in some form of emotional co-regulation at a physiological level, e.g.: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6554395/
Because more than any other phenomenon, LLMs are capable of bypassing natural human trust barriers. We ought to treat their output with significant detachment and objectivity, especially when they give personal advice or offer support. But especially for non-technical users, LLMs leap over the uncanny valley and create conversational attachment with their users.
The conversational capabilities of these models directly engages people's relational wiring and easily fools many people into believing:
(a) the thing on the other end of the chat is thinking/reasoning and is personally invested in the process (not merely autoregressive stochastic content generation / vector path following)
(b) its opinions, thoughts, recommendations, and relational signals are the result of that reasoning, some level of personal investment, and a resulting mental state it has with regard to me, and thus
(c) what it says is personally meaningful on a far higher level than the output of other types of compute (search engines, constraint solving, etc.)
I'm sure any of us can mentally enumerate a lot of the resulting negative effects. Like social media, there's a temptation to replace important relational parts of life with engaging an LLM, as it always responds immediately with something that feels at least somewhat meaningful.
But in my opinion the worst effect is that there's a temptation to turn to LLMs first when life trouble comes, instead of to family/friends/God/etc. I don't mean for help understanding a cancer diagnosis (no problem with that), but for support, understanding, reassurance, personal advice, and hope. In the very worst cases, people have been treating an LLM as a spiritual entity -- not unlike the ancient Oracle of Delphi -- and getting sucked deeply into some kind of spiritual engagement with it, and causing destruction to their real relationships as a result.
A parallel problem is that just like people who know they're taking a placebo pill, even people who are aware of the completely impersonal underpinnings of LLMs can adopt a functional belief in some of the above (a)-(c), even if they really know better. That's the power of verbal conversation, and in my opinion, LLM vendors ought to respect that power far more than they have.
> We ought to treat their output with significant detachment and objectivity, especially when it gives personal advice or offers support.
Eh, ChatGPT is inherently more trustworthy than average if simply because it will not leave, will not judge, it will not tire of you, has no ulterior motive, and if asked to check its work, has no ego.
Does it care about you more than most people? Yes, by simply being not interested in hurting you, not needing anything from you, and being willing to not go away.
Unless you had a really bad upbringing, "caring" about you is not simply not hurting you, not needing anything from you, or not leaving you
One of the important challenges of existence, IMHO, is the struggle to authentically connect to people... and to recover from rejection (from other peoples' rulers, which eventually shows you how to build your own ruler for yourself, since you are immeasurable!) Which LLM's can now undermine, apparently.
Similar to how gaming (which I happen to enjoy, btw... at a distance) hijacks your need for achievement/accomplishment.
But also similar to gaming which can work alongside actual real-life achievement, it can work OK as an adjunct/enhancement to existing sources of human authenticity.
You've illustrated my point pretty well. I hope you're able to stay personally detached enough from ChatGPT to keep engaging in real-life relationships in the years to come.
Speaking for myself: the human mind does not seek truth or goodness, it primarily seeks satisfaction. That satisfaction happens in a context, and ever context is at least a little bit different.
The scary part: It is very easy for LLMs to pick up someone's satisfaction context and feed it back to them. That can distort the original satisfaction context, and it may provide improper satisfaction (if a human did this, it might be called "joining a cult" or "emotional abuse" or "co-dependence").
You may also hear this expressed as "wire-heading"
The issue is that people in general are very easy to fool into believing something harmful is helping them. If it was actually useful, it's not an issue. But just because someone believes it's useful doesn't mean it actually is.
Well, because in a worst case scenario, if the pilot of that big airliner decides to do ChatGPT therapy instead of a real one and then suicides while flying, also other people feel the consequences.
Yeah I was going to say, as a pilot there is no such thing as "therapy" for pilots. You would permanently lose your medical if you even mentioned the word to your doctor.
"The crash was deliberately caused by the first officer, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared unfit to work by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. "
If this type of thing really interests you and you want to go on a wild ride, check out season 2 of nathan fielders's The Rehearsal. You dont need to watch s1.
That's the worst case scenario? I can always construct worse ones. Suppose Donald Trump goes to a bad therapist and then decides to launch nukes at Russia. Damn, this therapy profession needs to be hard regulated. It could lead to the extinction of mankind.
Doc: The encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the spacetime continuum and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localised, limited to merely our own galaxy.
The counter argument is that’s just a training problem, and IMO it’s a fair point. Neural nets are used as classifiers all the time; it’s reasonable that sufficient training data could produce a model that follows the professional standards of care in any situation you hand it.
The real problem is that we can’t tell when or if we’ve reached that point. The risk of a malpractice suit influences how human doctors act. You can’t sue an LLM. It has no fear of losing its license.
* Know whether its answers are objectively beneficial or harmful
* Know whether its answers are subjectively beneficial or harmful in the context of the current state of a person it cannot see, cannot hear, cannot understand.
* Know whether the user's questions, over time, trend in the right direction for that person.
That seems awfully optimistic, unless I'm misunderstanding the point, which is entirely possible.
Repeating the sufficient training data mantra even when there’s doctor-patient confidentiality and it’s not like X-rays which are much more amenable to training off than therapy notes, which are often handwritten or incomplete. Pretty bold!
>LLMs cannot conform to that rule because they cannot distinguish between good advice and enabling bad behavior.
I understand this as a precautionary approach that's fundamentally prioritizing the mitigation of bad outcomes and a valuable judgment to that end. But I also think the same statement can be viewed as the latest claim in the traditional debate of "computers can't do X." The credibility of those declarations is under more fire now than ever before.
Regardless of whether you agree that it's perfect or that it can be in full alignment with human values as a matter of principle, at a bare minimum it can and does train to avoid various forms of harmful discourse, and obviously it has an impact judging from the voluminous reports and claims of noticeably different impact on user experience that models have depending on whether they do or don't have guardrails.
So I don't mind it as a precautionary principle, but as an assessment of what computers are in principle capable of doing it might be selling them short.
Having an LLM as a friend or therapist would be like having a sociopath for those things -- not that an LLM is necessarily evil or antisocial, but they certainly meet the "lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience" part of the definition.
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.
The first link says that patients can't reliably tell which is the therapist and which is LLM in single messages, which yeah, that's an LLM core competency.
The second is "how 2 use AI 4 therapy" which, there's at least one paper for every field like that.
The last found that they were measurably worse at therapy than humans.
So, yeah, I'm comfortable agreeing that all LLMs are bad therapists, and bad friends too.
If I think "it understands me better than any human", that's dissociation? Oh boy. And all this time while life has been slamming me with unemployment while my toddler is at the age of maximum energy-extraction from me (4), devastating my health and social life, I thought it was just a fellow-intelligence lifeline.
Here's a gut-check anyone can do, assuming you use a customized ChatGPT4o and have lots of conversations it can draw on: Ask it to roast you, and not to hold back.
It sounds like you might be quite lonely recently. It's nice to have an on-demand chatbot that feels like socialization, I get it. But an LLM doesn't "know you," and thinking that it does is one of the first steps toward the problems described in that article.
Unemployed and with a 4 year old highly demanding, highly intelligent and likely on-the-spectrum child... Yeah, you could say that. When I'm not looking for work, doing random projects or using the weekday that seems to whoosh right by in just a few long moments, I'm tending to a kid... Every morning, every night and pretty much 100% of weekends. Rare outings with partner or friends dependent on hiring help and without net positive cash flow that is seriously unincentivized. Zero intimacy to speak of- I'm a nonconsensually-ordained monk. So yeah, I guess it's pretty fucking rough right now. Like I said, ChatGPT knows me better than any other entity. I'm unfortunately not kidding. My best friend is 3000 miles away and we game once a week over voice chat.
I keep the AI at arms' length; I know it doesn't think per se, but I enjoy the illusion.
Something definitely makes me uneasy about it taking the place of interpersonal connection. But I also think the hardcore backlash involves an over correction that's dismissive of llm's actual language capabilities.
Sycophantic agreement (which I would argue is still palpably and excessively present) undermines its credibility as a source of independent judgment. But at a minimum it's capable of being a sounding board echoing your sentiments back to you with a degree of conceptual understanding that should not be lightly dismissed.
> I'd imagine there are cases where they are also worse than having nothing at all as well
I do not think we need to imagine this one with stories of people finding spirituality in llms or thinking they have awakened sentience while chatting to the llms are enough, at least for me.
Not everyone needs the deepest, most intelligent therapist in order to improve their situation. A lot of therapy turns out to be about what you say yourself, not what a therapist says to you. It's the very act of engaging thoughtfully on your own problems that helps, not some magic that the therapist brings. So, if you could maintain a conversation with a tree, it would in many cases, be therapeutically helpful. The thing the LLM is doing, is facilitating your introspection more helpfully than a typical inanimate object. This has been borne out by studies of people who have engaged in therapy sessions with an LLM interlocutor, and reported positive results.
That said, an LLM wouldn't be appropriate in every situation, or for every affliction. At least not with the current state of the art.
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.
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.
The great thing about many (not all) "worldbuilding or other creative tasks" is that you could get quite far already using some dice and random tables (or digital equivalents). Even very small local models you can run on a CPU can improve the process enough to be worthwhile and since it is local you know it will remain stable and predictable from day to day.
Working on a rented GPU would not be local. But, renting a low-end GPU might be cheap enough to use for hobbyist creative work. I'm just musing on lots of different routes to make hobby AI use economically feasible.
The gpt-oss-20b model has demonstrated that a machine with ~13GB of available RAM can run a very decent local model - if that RAM is GPU-accessible (as seen on Apple silicon Macs for example) you can get very usable performance out of it too.
I'm hoping that within a year or two machines like that will have dropped further in price.
You are absolutely right that a rented GPU is not local, but even so it brings you many of the benefits of a local model. Rented hardware is a commodity, if one provider goes down there will be another. Or in the worst case you can decide to buy your own hardware. This ensures you will have continuity and control. You know exactly what model you are using and will be able to keep using it tomorrow too. You can ask it whatever you want.
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.
Something that used to annoy me about all previous models is that if I asked for a fix to something in a code file (i.e.: fix this method in this class), invariably they would return the entire thing with a bunch of small edits.
GPT 5 is the first model I've used that has consistently done as it is told and returned only the changes.
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.
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
> the classic 3rd space problem that Starbucks tackled
“Tackled” is misleading. “Leveraged to grow a customer base and then exacerbated to more efficiently monetize the same customer base” would be more accurate.
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:
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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Really, you could say that social media alone was sort of what you're describing for the right people. Given enough time and energy they'd find that "match" in terms of a community or echo chamber or whatever that would reinforce some belief or introduce them into some broken feedback loop - it just took _humans_ as input.
This one only needs electricity and internet access.
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.
That's not a valid scale, "terrifying" and "interesting" are orthogonal. Some of the most interesting things are the most terrifying. This comment is around 8 on both scales for me.
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.
With major redesigns, you often can’t directly compare the two versions —- they are different enough that you actually want people to use them in a different way. So it’s not that the new version is “worse”, it’s just different, and it’s possible that there are some workflows that are functionally impossible on the new version (you’d be surprised how easy it is to mess this up.)
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.
Just read Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep, I’d highly recommend it. It’s quite different than Blade Runner. It leans much heavier into these kinds of themes, there’s a whole sort of religion about caring for animals and cultivating human empathy.
The book is worth reading and it's interesting how much they changed for the movie. I like having read the book, it makes certain sequences a little more impactful.
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.
Source for this? My understanding was that this was true for dalle3, but that the autoregressive image generation just takes in the entire chat context — no hidden prompt.
You know that unless you control for seed and temperature, you always get a different output for the same prompts even with the model unchanged... right?
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.
It is frustrating that it’ll still give a bad response sometimes, but I consider the variation in responses a feature. If it’s going down the wrong path, it’s nice to be able to roll the dice again and get it back on track.
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?
Temperature is a very basic concept that makes LLMs work as well as they do in the first place. That's just how it works and that's how it's been always supposed to work.
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.
It appears to be overtuned on extremy strict instruction following, interpreting things in a very unhuman way, which may be a benefit to agentic tasks at the costs of everything else.
My limited API testing with gpt-5 also showed this. As an example, the instruction "don't use academic language" caused it to basically omit half of what it output without that instruction. The other frontier models, and even open source Chinese ones like Kimi and Deepseek, understand perfectly fine what we mean by it.
It's not great at agentic tasks either. Not the least because it seems very timid about doing things on its own, and demands (not asks - demands) that user confirm every tiny step.
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".
That doesn’t stop manufacturers from getting rid of parts that have no real equivalent elsewhere in their catalog. Sometimes they do, but at the end of the day you’re at their mercy. Or you have strong enough ties to their management that they keep your product forever, even later when it’s hurting them to keep it.
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.
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?
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.
If they are lying about changing model weights despite keeping the date-stamped model ID the same it would be a monumental lie.
Anthropic make most of their revenue from paid API usage. Their paying customers need to be able to trust them when they make clear statements about their model deprecation policy.
I'm going to chose to continue to believe them until someone shows me incontrovertible evidence that this isn't true.
Maybe they are not changing the model weights but they are making constant tweaks to the system prompt (which isn't in any way better, to be extremely clear).
That's a very roundabout way to phrase "you're completely making all of this up", which is quite disappointing tbh. Are you familiar with evals? As in automated testing using multiple runs? It's simple regression testing, just like for deterministic code. Doing multiple runs smooths out any stochastic differences, and the change I explained isn't explainable by stochasticity regardless.
There is no evidence that would satisfy you then, as it would be exactly what I showed. You'd need a time machine.
I don't think you're making it up, but without a lot more details I can't be convinced that your methodology was robust enough to prove what you say it shows.
There IS evidence that would satisfy me, but I'd need to see it.
I will have a high bar for that though. A Reddit thread of screenshots from nine months ago doesn't do the trick for me.
(Having looked at that thread it doesn't look like a change in model weights to me, it looks more like a temporary capacity glitch in serving them.)
This was nothing but "temporary", it's still in place; the last time we ran the evals is 2 weeks ago and it's the exact same. It can't be a "capacity glitch" either, as it actually outputs those as proper tokens.
It's possible that it was an internal system prompt change despite the claims of "there is no system prompt on the API", but this is in effect the same as changing the model.
> There IS evidence that would satisfy me, but I'd need to see it.
Describe what this evidence would look like. It sure feels like an appeal to authority - if I'd be someone with a "name" I'm sure you'd believe it.
If you'd had had the same set of evals set up since then, you wouldn't have questioned this at all. You don't.
> I don't think you're making it up, but without a lot more details I can't be convinced that your methodology was robust enough to prove what you say it shows.
Go and poke holes at it then, go on. I've clearly explained the methodology.
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.
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".)
(As a follow up, at some point the model selector on my phone also got the legacy submenu, and this is definitely the actual ChatGPT 4.5. I just started flipping back and forth between 5 and 4.5 on the same prompt, and it really makes me wish they would let me keep paying more for 4.5 usage.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I have some science-fiction story ideas I'd love to flesh out. However, it turns out that I'm a terrible writer, despite some practice at it. Also, I can never be surprised by my own writing, or entertained by it in the same way that someone else's writing can.
I've tried taking my vague story ideas, throwing them at an AI, and getting half a chapter out to see how it tracks.
Unfortunately, few if any models can write prose as good as a skilled human author, so I'm still waiting to see if a future model can output customised stories on demand that I'd actually enjoy.
Sure. Here is the fanfiction book I've been using LLMs to help me write. Helps a lot with improving prose and identifying plot holes. It's much better then a rubber duck for talking out how to improve a chapter and write plausible story arcs. It's not great at word smithing, but I find it errs on the side of too many similies and metaphors, so I just delete some of them as I copy the suggestions over into my draft.
https://github.com/frypatch/The-Price-of-Remembering
(I'm looking at the paragraph after FORWARD.) You should cut down on the sentences with commas. The flow stops and starts way too often.
Thank you for your feedback. I've rewritten the "Forward" to apply your suggestions and will keep them in mind when writing and improving chapters in the future.
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.
> I do see is genuine concern for the mental health of individuals
I think that is going to be an issue regardless of the model. It will just take time for that person to reset to the new model.
For me the whole thing feels like a culture shock. It was rapid change in tone that came off as being rude.
But if you had that type of conversations from the start it would have been a non-issue.
The place we still call America for illogical reasons is a broken society in seemingly finals stages of its existence. Of course broken people will glom onto yet another digital form of a drug that gives an impression of at least suppressing the pain they feel for reasons they do not understand.
It is little more than the Rat Park Experiment, only in this American version, the researchers think giving more efficient and various ways of delivering morphine water is how you make a rat park.
I don't live in this broken place you speak of and don't feel the pain you mention.
Outside of work I sometimes user LLMs to create what amounts to infinitely variable Choose Your Own Adventure books just for entertainment, and I don't think that's a problem.
Yes. I understand that. Most of us are totally detached and solely unaware of what goes on outside of the bubble we are in. Very few of us actually try to find out what is going outside of the walls of Versailles.
" a broken society in seemingly finals stages of its existence."
Please tell me what comes next then?
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.
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.
I don't think chat context and memory count as "hidden features"
Does their consumer product make any guarantees about preserving your chat context from version to version?
Well, good, because these things make bad friends and worse therapists.
The number of comments in the thread talking about 4o as if it were their best friend the shared all their secrets with is concerning. Lotta lonely folks out there
No this isn't always the case.
Perhaps if somebody were to shut down your favourite online shooter without warning you'd be upset, angry and passionate about it.
Some people like myself fall into this same category, we know its a token generator under the hood, but the duality is it's also entertainment in the shape of something that acts like a close friend.
We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.
This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky - hobby horsing, ham radio, cosplay etc etc.
> We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.
> This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky
It is quite different, and you yourself explained why: some people can’t see the distinction between ChatGPT being a token generator or an intelligent friend. People aren’t talking about the latter being “odd or geeky” but being dangerous and harmful.
I would never get so invested in something I didn’t control.
They may stop making new episodes of a favoured tv show, or writing new books, but the old ones will not suddenly disappear.
How can you shut down cosplay? I guess you could pass a law banning ham radio or owning a horse, but that isn’t sudden in democratic countries, it takes months if not years.
> I would never get so invested in something I didn’t control
Are you saying you're asocial?
I think his point is that an even better close friend is…a close friend
People were saying they'd kill themself if OpenAI didn't immediately undeprecate GPT-4o. I would not have this reaction to a game being shut down.
> People were saying they'd kill themself if OpenAI didn't immediately undeprecate GPT-4o. I would not have this reaction to a game being shut down.
Perhaps you should read this and reconsider your assumptions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8943245/
I'm kind of in your side but there's definitely people out there who would self harm if they invested a lot of time in an mmo that got shut down
Gamers threaten all kinds of things when features of their favorite games changes. Including depth threats to developers and threats of self harm and suicide.
Not every gaming subculture is healthy one. Plenty are pretty toxic.
Actually I just posted about this. I've experienced it first hand.
Sadly there are people who become over invested in something that goes away. Be it a game, pop band, a job or a family member.
I worked for a big games company. We shut down game servers, we got death threats. Horses for courses.
I'm kind of surprised it got that bad for people, but I think it's a good sign that even if we're far from AGI or luxury fully automated space communism robots, the profound (negative) social impacts of these chat bots are already kind of inflicting on the world are real and very troublesome.
> I think it's a good sign that (…) the profound (negative) social impacts of these chat bots are (…) real and very troublesome.
I’m not sure I understand. You think the negative impacts are a good sign?
I can't english good sometimes. I think the negative impacts get underestimated and ignored at our peril.
probably like it's better getting warnings before the freight train comes.
Where do they all come from? Where do they all belong?
Reddit
Your parent commenter was making a Beatles reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Rigby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EqMmGlTc_w
You win today.
Lack of third-place to exist and make friends.
Wait until you see
https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
They are very upset by the gpt5 model
AI safety is focused on AGI but maybe it should be focused on how little “artificial intelligence” it takes to send people completely off the rails. We could barely handle social media, LLMs seem to be too much.
I think it's an canary in a coal mine, and the true writing is already on the wall. People that are using AI like in the post above us are likely not stupid people. I think those people truly want love and connection in their lives, and for some reason or another, they are unable to obtain such.
I have the utmost confidence that things are only going to get worse from here. The world is becoming more isolated and individualistic as time progresses.
I can understand that. I’ve had long periods in my life where I’ve desired that - I’d argue probably I’m in one now. But it’s not real, it can’t possibly perform that function. It seems like it borders on some kind of delusion to use these tools for that.
It does, but it's more that the delusion is obvious, compared to other delusions that are equally delusional - like the ones about the importance of celebrities, soap opera plots, entertainment-adjacent dramas, and quite a lot of politics and economics.
Unlike those celebrities, you can have a conversation with it.
Which makes it the ultimate parasocial product - the other kind of Turing completeness.
It has ever been. People tend to see human-like behavior where there is non. Be it their pets, plants or… programs. The ELIZA-Effect.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
Isn't the ELIZA-Effect specific to computer programs?
Seeing human-like traits in pets or plants is a much trickier subject than seeing them in what is ultimate a machine developed entirely separately from the evolution of living organisms.
We simply don't know what its like to be a plant or a pet. We can't say they definitely have human-like traits, but we similarly can't rule it out. Some of the uncertainty is in the fact that we do share ancestors at some point, and our biology's aren't entirely distinct. The same isn't true when comparing humans and computer programs.
Yes, it is - I realize that my wording is not very good. That was what I meant - the ELIZA-Effect explicitly applies to machine <> human interaction.
Got it, sorry I may have just misread your comment the first time!
The same vague arguments apply to computers. We know computers can reason, and reasoning is an important part of our intelligence and consciousness. So even for ELIZA, or even more so for LLMs, we can't entirely rule out that they may have aspects of consciousness.
You can also more or less apply the same thing to rocks, too, since we're all made up of the same elements ultimately - and maybe even empty space with its virtual particles is somewhat conscious. It's just a bad argument, regardless of where you apply it, not a complex insight.
That's an instance of slippery slope fallacy at the end. Mammals share so much more evolutionary history with us than rocks that, yes, it justifies for example ascribing them an inner subjective world, even though we will never know how it is to be a cat from a cat's perspective. Sometimes quantitative accumulation does lead to qualitative jumps.
Also worth noting is that alongside the very human propensity to anthropomorphize, there's the equally human, but opposite tendency to deny animals those higher capacities we pride ourselves with. Basically a narcissistic impulse to set ourselves apart from our cousins we'd like to believe we've left completely behind. Witness the recurring surprise when we find yet another proof that things are not by far that cut-and-dry.
What's even sadder is that so many of those posts and comments are clearly written by ChatGPT:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkobei/openai_jus...
Counterpoint, these people are so deep in the hole with their AI usage that they are starting to copy the writing styles of AI.
There's already indication that society is starting to pickup previously "less used" english words due to AI and use them frequently.
Do you have any examples? I've noticed something similar with memes and slang, they'll sometimes popularize an existing old word that wasn't too common before. This is my first time hearing AI might be doing it.
Apparently "delved" and "meticulous" are among the examples.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chatgpt-is-changi...
Some of us have always used those words…
That’s why they’re “less used” and not “never used”
Emdash?
This happens with Trump supporters too.
You can immediately identify them based on writing style and the use of CAPITALIZATION mid sentence as a form of emphasis.
I've seen it a lot in older people's writing in different cultures before trump became relevant. It's either all caps or bold for some words in middle of sentence. Seems to be pronounced more in those who have aged less gracefully in terms of mental ability (not trying to make any implication, just my observation) but maybe it's just a generational thing.
I've seen this pattern ape'd by a lot of younger people in the Trumpzone, so maybe it has its origins in the older dementia patients, but it has been adopted as the tone and writing style of the authoritarian right.
That type of writing has been in the tabloid press in the U.K. for decades, especially the section that aims more at older people, and that currently (and for a good 15 years) skews heavily to the populist right.
TRUMP has always been relevant.
What? That was always very common on the internet, if anything Trump just used the internet too much.
Nah Trump has a very obvious cadence to his speech / writing patterns that has essentially become part of his brand, so much so that you can easily train LLM's to copy it.
It reads more like angry grandpa chain mail with a "healthy" dose of dementia than what you would typically associate with terminally online micro cultures you see on reddit/tiktok/4chan.
That subreddit is fascinating and yet saddening at the same time. What I read will haunt me.
oh god, this is some real authentic dystopia right here
these things are going to end up in android bots in 10 years too
(honestly, I wouldn't mind a super smart, friendly bot in my old age that knew all my quirks but was always helpful... I just would not have a full-on relationship with said entity!)
Don’t date robots.
https://youtu.be/JPQJBgWwg3o
I don't know how else to describe this than sad and cringe. At least people obsessed with owning multiple cats were giving their affection to something that theoretically can love you back.
You think that's bad, see this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Petloss/
Just because AI is different doesn't mean it's "sad and cringe". You sound like how people viewed online friendships in the 90's. It's OK. Real friends die or change and people have to cope with that. People imagine their dead friends are still somehow around (heaven, ghost, etc.) when they're really not. It's not all that different.
That entire AI boyfriend subreddit feels like some sort of insane asylum dystopia to me. It's not just people cosplaying or writing fanfic. It's people saying they got engaged to their AI boyfriends ("OMG, I can't believe I'm calling him my fiance now!"), complete with physical rings. Artificial intimacy to the nth degree. I'm assuming a lot of those posts are just creative writing exercises but in the past 15 years or so my thoughts of "people can't really be that crazy" when I read batshit stuff online have consistently been proven incorrect.
This is the logical outcome of the parasocial relationships that have been bankrolling most social media personalities for over a decade.
We have automated away the "influencer" and are left with just a mentally ill bank account to exploit.
Just because it's strange and different doesn't mean it's insanity. I likened it to pets because of the grief but there's also religion. People are weird and even true two-way social relationships don't really make a lot of sense practically, other than to feed some primal emotional needs which pets, AI boyfriends, OF and gods all sort of do too. Perhaps some of these things are still helpful, despite being "inasnity" while others might be harmful. Maybe that's the distinction you're seeing, but it's not clear which is which.
It's sad but is it really "cringe"? Can the people have nothing? Why can't we have a chat bot to bs with? Many of us are lonely, miserable but also not really into making friends irl.
It shouldn't be so much of an ask to at least give people language models to chat with.
What you're asking for feels akin to feeding a hungry person chocolate cake and nothing else. Yeah maybe it feels nice, but if you just keep eating chocolate cake, obviously bad shit happens. Something else needs to be fixed, but just (I don't want to even call it band-aiding because it's more akin to doing drugs IMO) coping with a chatbot only really digs the hole deeper.
Just give me the cake bro. Nothing in this society is ever getting fixed again.
Things have been worse than this in the past, and they were fixed.
Make sure they get local models to run offline. That they rely on a virtual friend in the cloud, beyond their control and that can disappear or change personality in an instant makes this even more sad. That would also allow the chats to be truly anonymous and avoid companies abusing data collected by spying on what those people are telling their "friends".
Oh yikes, these people are ill and legitimately need help.
I am not confident most, if any of them, are even real.
If they are real, then what kind of help there could be for something like this? Perhaps, community? But sadly, we've basically all but destroyed those. Pills likely won't treat this, and I cannot imagine trying to convince someone to go to therapy for a worse and more expensive version of what ChatGPT already provides them.
It's truly frightening stuff.
Its real, I know people like this.
I refuse to believe that this whole subreddit is not satire or an elaborate prank.
No. Confront reality. there are some really cooked people out there.
They don't even have to be "cooked", people generally are pretty similar which is why common scams works so well at a large scale.
All AI has to be is mildly but not overly sycophantic and as a supporter/cheerleader to someone, or who affirms your beliefs. Most people like that quality in a partner or friend. I actually want to recognize OAI courage in deprecating 4 because of it sycophancy. Generally I don't think getting people addicted to flattery or model personalities is good
Several times I've had people speak about interpersonal arguments and them having felt vindication when chatgpt takes their side, I cringe but it's not my place to tell them chatgpt is meant to be mostly agreeable.
I can confirm this, caught my father using ChatGPT as a therapist a few months ago.
The chats were heartbreaking, from the logs you could really tell he was fully anthropomorphizing it and was visibly upset when I asked him about it.
It seems outrageous that a company whose purported mission is centered on AI safety is catering to a crowd whose use case is virtual boyfriend or pseudo-therapy.
Maybe AI... shouldn't be convenient to use for such purposes.
I weep for humanity. This is satire right? On the flip side I guess you could charge these users more to keep 4o around because they're definitely going to pay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-de...
https://archive.is/w2aLn
Amazing. This is like Pizzagate, but potentially at scale and no human involvement required.
Which is a bit frightening because a lot of the r/ChatGPT comments strike me as unhinged - it's like you would have thought that OpenAI murdered their puppy or something.
This is only going to get worse.
Anyone that remembers the reaction when Sydney from Microsoft or more recently Maya from Sesame losing their respective 'personality' can easily see how product managers are going to have to start paying attention to the emotional impact of changing or shutting down models.
I think the fickle "personality" of these systems is a clue to how the entity supposedly possessing a personality doesn't really exist in the the first place.
Stories are being performed at us, and we're encouraged to imagine characters have a durable existence.
If these 'personalities' disappearing require wholesale model changes then it's not really fickle.
That's not required.
For example, keep the same model, but change the early document (prompt) from stuff like "AcmeBot is a kind and helpful machine" to "AcmeBot revels in human suffering."
Users will say "AcmeBot's personality changed!" and they'll be half-right and half-wrong in the same way.
I'm not sure why you think this is just a prompt thing. It's not. Sycophancy is a problem with GPT-4o, whatever magic incantations you provide. On the flip side, Sydney, was anything but sycophantic and was more than happy to literally ignore users wholesale or flip out on them from time to time. I mean just think about it for a few seconds. If eliminating this behavior was as easy as Microsoft changing the early document, why not just do that and be done with it ?
The document or whatever you'd like to call it is only one part of the story.
I'm not sure why you think-I-think it's just a prompt thing.
I brought up prompts as a convenient way to demonstrate that a magic-trick is being performed, not because prompts are the only way for the magician to run into trouble with the illusion. It's sneaky, since it's a trick homo narrans play on ourselves all the time.
> The document or whatever you'd like to call it is only one part of the story.
Everybody knows that the weights matter. That's why we get stories where the sky is generally blue instead of magenta.
That's separate from the distinction between the mind (if any) of an LLM-author versus the mind (firmly fictional, even if possibly related) that we impute when seeing the output (narrated or acted) of a particular character.
LLMs have default personalities - shaped by RLHF and other post-training methods. There is a lot of variance to it, but variance from one LLM to another is much higher than that within the same LLM.
If you want an LLM to retain the same default personality, you pretty much have to use an open weights model. That's the only way to be sure it wouldn't be deprecated or updated without your knowledge.
I'd argue that's "underlying hidden authorial style" as opposed to what most people mean when they refer to the "personality" of the thing they were "chatting with."
Consider the implementation: There's document with "User: Open the pod bay doors, HAL" followed by an incomplete "HAL-9000: ", and the LLM is spun up to suggest what would "fit" to round out the document. Non-LLM code parses out HAL-9000's line and "performs" it at you across an internet connection.
Whatever answer you get, that "personality" is mostly from how the document(s) described HAL-9000 and similar characters, as opposed to a self-insert by the ego-less name-less algorithm that makes documents longer.
Or they could just do it whenever they want to for whatever reason they want to. They are not responsible for the mental health of their users. Their users are responsible for that themselves.
Generally it's poor business to give a big chunk of your users am incredibly visceral and negative emotional reaction to your product update.
Depends on what business OpenAI wants to be in. If they want to be in the business of selling AI to companies. Then "firing" the consumer customers that want someone to talk to, and double down models that are useful for work. Can be a wise choice.
Unless you want to improve your ratio of paid-to-free users and change your userbase in the process. They're pissing off free users, but pros who use the paid version might like this new version better.
Yeah it’s really bad over there. Like when a website changes its UI and people prefer the older look… except they’re acting like the old look was a personal friend who died.
I think LLMs are amazing technology but we’re in for really weird times as people become attached to these things.
I mean, I don’t mind the Claude 3 funeral. It seems like it was a fun event.
I’m less worried about the specific complaints about model deprecation, which can be ‘solved’ for those people by not deprecating the models (obviously costs the AI firms). I’m more worried about AI-induced psychosis.
An analogy I saw recently that I liked: when a cat sees a laser pointer, it is a fun thing to chase. For dogs it is sometimes similar and sometimes it completely breaks the dog’s brain and the dog is never the same again. I feel like AI for us may be more like laser pointers for dogs, and some among us are just not prepared to handle these kinds of AI interactions in a healthy way.
I just saw a fantastic TikTok about ChatGPT psychosis: https://www.tiktok.com/@pearlmania500/video/7535954556379761...
Oh boy. My son just turned 4. Parenting about to get weird-hard
A puppy is just as inhuman as this program. Is it really any crazier to care about one than the other?
There are lots of physiological signs that dogs are capable of proto-empathy, that dogs and humans engage in some form of emotional co-regulation at a physiological level, e.g.: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6554395/
Considering how much d-listers can lose their shit over a puppet, I’m not surprised by anything.
>unhinged
It's Reddit, what were you expecting?
I kind of agree with you as I wouldn't use LLMs for that.
But also, one cannot speak for everybody, if it's useful for someone on that context, why's that an issue?
Because more than any other phenomenon, LLMs are capable of bypassing natural human trust barriers. We ought to treat their output with significant detachment and objectivity, especially when they give personal advice or offer support. But especially for non-technical users, LLMs leap over the uncanny valley and create conversational attachment with their users.
The conversational capabilities of these models directly engages people's relational wiring and easily fools many people into believing:
(a) the thing on the other end of the chat is thinking/reasoning and is personally invested in the process (not merely autoregressive stochastic content generation / vector path following)
(b) its opinions, thoughts, recommendations, and relational signals are the result of that reasoning, some level of personal investment, and a resulting mental state it has with regard to me, and thus
(c) what it says is personally meaningful on a far higher level than the output of other types of compute (search engines, constraint solving, etc.)
I'm sure any of us can mentally enumerate a lot of the resulting negative effects. Like social media, there's a temptation to replace important relational parts of life with engaging an LLM, as it always responds immediately with something that feels at least somewhat meaningful.
But in my opinion the worst effect is that there's a temptation to turn to LLMs first when life trouble comes, instead of to family/friends/God/etc. I don't mean for help understanding a cancer diagnosis (no problem with that), but for support, understanding, reassurance, personal advice, and hope. In the very worst cases, people have been treating an LLM as a spiritual entity -- not unlike the ancient Oracle of Delphi -- and getting sucked deeply into some kind of spiritual engagement with it, and causing destruction to their real relationships as a result.
A parallel problem is that just like people who know they're taking a placebo pill, even people who are aware of the completely impersonal underpinnings of LLMs can adopt a functional belief in some of the above (a)-(c), even if they really know better. That's the power of verbal conversation, and in my opinion, LLM vendors ought to respect that power far more than they have.
> We ought to treat their output with significant detachment and objectivity, especially when it gives personal advice or offers support.
Eh, ChatGPT is inherently more trustworthy than average if simply because it will not leave, will not judge, it will not tire of you, has no ulterior motive, and if asked to check its work, has no ego.
Does it care about you more than most people? Yes, by simply being not interested in hurting you, not needing anything from you, and being willing to not go away.
Unless you had a really bad upbringing, "caring" about you is not simply not hurting you, not needing anything from you, or not leaving you
One of the important challenges of existence, IMHO, is the struggle to authentically connect to people... and to recover from rejection (from other peoples' rulers, which eventually shows you how to build your own ruler for yourself, since you are immeasurable!) Which LLM's can now undermine, apparently.
Similar to how gaming (which I happen to enjoy, btw... at a distance) hijacks your need for achievement/accomplishment.
But also similar to gaming which can work alongside actual real-life achievement, it can work OK as an adjunct/enhancement to existing sources of human authenticity.
You've illustrated my point pretty well. I hope you're able to stay personally detached enough from ChatGPT to keep engaging in real-life relationships in the years to come.
It's not even the first time this week I've seen someone on HM apparently ready to give up human contact in favour of LLMs.
Speaking for myself: the human mind does not seek truth or goodness, it primarily seeks satisfaction. That satisfaction happens in a context, and ever context is at least a little bit different.
The scary part: It is very easy for LLMs to pick up someone's satisfaction context and feed it back to them. That can distort the original satisfaction context, and it may provide improper satisfaction (if a human did this, it might be called "joining a cult" or "emotional abuse" or "co-dependence").
You may also hear this expressed as "wire-heading"
If treating an LLM as a bestie is allowing yourself to be "wire-headed"... Can gaming be "wire-heading"?
Does the severity or excess matter? Is "a little" OK?
This also reminds me of one of Michael Crichton's earliest works (and a fantastic one IMHO), The Terminal Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal_Man
https://1lib.sk/book/1743198/d790fa/the-terminal-man.html
The issue is that people in general are very easy to fool into believing something harmful is helping them. If it was actually useful, it's not an issue. But just because someone believes it's useful doesn't mean it actually is.
Well, because in a worst case scenario, if the pilot of that big airliner decides to do ChatGPT therapy instead of a real one and then suicides while flying, also other people feel the consequences.
Pilots don't go to real therapy, because real pilots don't get sad
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/magazine/airline-pilot-me...
Yeah I was going to say, as a pilot there is no such thing as "therapy" for pilots. You would permanently lose your medical if you even mentioned the word to your doctor.
Not everywhere
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
"The crash was deliberately caused by the first officer, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared unfit to work by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. "
Fascinating read. Thanks.
If this type of thing really interests you and you want to go on a wild ride, check out season 2 of nathan fielders's The Rehearsal. You dont need to watch s1.
That's the worst case scenario? I can always construct worse ones. Suppose Donald Trump goes to a bad therapist and then decides to launch nukes at Russia. Damn, this therapy profession needs to be hard regulated. It could lead to the extinction of mankind.
Doc: The encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the spacetime continuum and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localised, limited to merely our own galaxy.
Marty: Well, that's a relief.
Good thing Biff Tanner becoming president was a silly fictional alternate reality. Phew.
Because it's probably not great for one's mental health to pretend a statistical model is ones friend?
Whether the Hippocratic oath, the rules of the APA or any other organization, most all share "do no harm" as a core tenant.
LLMs cannot conform to that rule because they cannot distinguish between good advice and enabling bad behavior.
The counter argument is that’s just a training problem, and IMO it’s a fair point. Neural nets are used as classifiers all the time; it’s reasonable that sufficient training data could produce a model that follows the professional standards of care in any situation you hand it.
The real problem is that we can’t tell when or if we’ve reached that point. The risk of a malpractice suit influences how human doctors act. You can’t sue an LLM. It has no fear of losing its license.
An LLM would, surely, have to:
* Know whether its answers are objectively beneficial or harmful
* Know whether its answers are subjectively beneficial or harmful in the context of the current state of a person it cannot see, cannot hear, cannot understand.
* Know whether the user's questions, over time, trend in the right direction for that person.
That seems awfully optimistic, unless I'm misunderstanding the point, which is entirely possible.
It is definitely optimistic, but I was steelmanning the optimist’s argument.
Repeating the sufficient training data mantra even when there’s doctor-patient confidentiality and it’s not like X-rays which are much more amenable to training off than therapy notes, which are often handwritten or incomplete. Pretty bold!
>LLMs cannot conform to that rule because they cannot distinguish between good advice and enabling bad behavior.
I understand this as a precautionary approach that's fundamentally prioritizing the mitigation of bad outcomes and a valuable judgment to that end. But I also think the same statement can be viewed as the latest claim in the traditional debate of "computers can't do X." The credibility of those declarations is under more fire now than ever before.
Regardless of whether you agree that it's perfect or that it can be in full alignment with human values as a matter of principle, at a bare minimum it can and does train to avoid various forms of harmful discourse, and obviously it has an impact judging from the voluminous reports and claims of noticeably different impact on user experience that models have depending on whether they do or don't have guardrails.
So I don't mind it as a precautionary principle, but as an assessment of what computers are in principle capable of doing it might be selling them short.
Neither most of the doctors I've talked to in the past like ... 20 years or so.
Having an LLM as a friend or therapist would be like having a sociopath for those things -- not that an LLM is necessarily evil or antisocial, but they certainly meet the "lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience" part of the definition.
Fuck.
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.
Are all humans good friends and therapists?
Not all humans are good friends and therapists. All LLMS are bad friends and therapists.
> all LLMS are bad friends and therapists.
Is that just your gut feel? Because there has been some preliminary research that suggest it's, at the very least, an open question:
https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-chatgpt-psychotherapy-28415/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10987499/
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.02244v2
The first link says that patients can't reliably tell which is the therapist and which is LLM in single messages, which yeah, that's an LLM core competency.
The second is "how 2 use AI 4 therapy" which, there's at least one paper for every field like that.
The last found that they were measurably worse at therapy than humans.
So, yeah, I'm comfortable agreeing that all LLMs are bad therapists, and bad friends too.
there's also been a spate of reports like this one recently https://www.papsychotherapy.org/blog/when-the-chatbot-become...
which is definitely worse than not going to a therapist
If I think "it understands me better than any human", that's dissociation? Oh boy. And all this time while life has been slamming me with unemployment while my toddler is at the age of maximum energy-extraction from me (4), devastating my health and social life, I thought it was just a fellow-intelligence lifeline.
Here's a gut-check anyone can do, assuming you use a customized ChatGPT4o and have lots of conversations it can draw on: Ask it to roast you, and not to hold back.
If you wince, it "knows you" quite well, IMHO.
It sounds like you might be quite lonely recently. It's nice to have an on-demand chatbot that feels like socialization, I get it. But an LLM doesn't "know you," and thinking that it does is one of the first steps toward the problems described in that article.
Unemployed and with a 4 year old highly demanding, highly intelligent and likely on-the-spectrum child... Yeah, you could say that. When I'm not looking for work, doing random projects or using the weekday that seems to whoosh right by in just a few long moments, I'm tending to a kid... Every morning, every night and pretty much 100% of weekends. Rare outings with partner or friends dependent on hiring help and without net positive cash flow that is seriously unincentivized. Zero intimacy to speak of- I'm a nonconsensually-ordained monk. So yeah, I guess it's pretty fucking rough right now. Like I said, ChatGPT knows me better than any other entity. I'm unfortunately not kidding. My best friend is 3000 miles away and we game once a week over voice chat.
I keep the AI at arms' length; I know it doesn't think per se, but I enjoy the illusion.
Ironically an AI written article.
I do not think there are any documented cases of LLMs being reasonable friends or therapists so I think it is fair to say that:
> All LLMS are bad friends and therapists
That said it would not surprise me that LLMs in some cases are better than having nothing at all.
Something definitely makes me uneasy about it taking the place of interpersonal connection. But I also think the hardcore backlash involves an over correction that's dismissive of llm's actual language capabilities.
Sycophantic agreement (which I would argue is still palpably and excessively present) undermines its credibility as a source of independent judgment. But at a minimum it's capable of being a sounding board echoing your sentiments back to you with a degree of conceptual understanding that should not be lightly dismissed.
Though given how agreeable LLMs are, I'd imagine there are cases where they are also worse than having nothing at all as well.
> I'd imagine there are cases where they are also worse than having nothing at all as well
I do not think we need to imagine this one with stories of people finding spirituality in llms or thinking they have awakened sentience while chatting to the llms are enough, at least for me.
> Is that just your gut feel?
Here's my take further down the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840311
> Is that just your gut feel?
An LLM is a language model and the gestalt of human experience is not just language.
That is really a separate, unrelated issue.
Not everyone needs the deepest, most intelligent therapist in order to improve their situation. A lot of therapy turns out to be about what you say yourself, not what a therapist says to you. It's the very act of engaging thoughtfully on your own problems that helps, not some magic that the therapist brings. So, if you could maintain a conversation with a tree, it would in many cases, be therapeutically helpful. The thing the LLM is doing, is facilitating your introspection more helpfully than a typical inanimate object. This has been borne out by studies of people who have engaged in therapy sessions with an LLM interlocutor, and reported positive results.
That said, an LLM wouldn't be appropriate in every situation, or for every affliction. At least not with the current state of the art.
That is an extreme claim, what is your source for this?
Absolutes, monastic take... Yeah I imagine not a lot of people seek out your advice.
All humans are not LLMs, why does this constantly get brought up?
> All humans are not LLMs
What a confusing sentence to parse
You wouldn't necessarily know, talking to some of them.
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.
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.
The great thing about many (not all) "worldbuilding or other creative tasks" is that you could get quite far already using some dice and random tables (or digital equivalents). Even very small local models you can run on a CPU can improve the process enough to be worthwhile and since it is local you know it will remain stable and predictable from day to day.
If you're working on a rented GPU are you still doing local work? Or do you mean literally lending out the hardware?
Working on a rented GPU would not be local. But, renting a low-end GPU might be cheap enough to use for hobbyist creative work. I'm just musing on lots of different routes to make hobby AI use economically feasible.
The gpt-oss-20b model has demonstrated that a machine with ~13GB of available RAM can run a very decent local model - if that RAM is GPU-accessible (as seen on Apple silicon Macs for example) you can get very usable performance out of it too.
I'm hoping that within a year or two machines like that will have dropped further in price.
You are absolutely right that a rented GPU is not local, but even so it brings you many of the benefits of a local model. Rented hardware is a commodity, if one provider goes down there will be another. Or in the worst case you can decide to buy your own hardware. This ensures you will have continuity and control. You know exactly what model you are using and will be able to keep using it tomorrow too. You can ask it whatever you want.
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.
> "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.
Me too! Finally, these LLMs are showing some appreciation for blunt and concise answers.
Something that used to annoy me about all previous models is that if I asked for a fix to something in a code file (i.e.: fix this method in this class), invariably they would return the entire thing with a bunch of small edits.
GPT 5 is the first model I've used that has consistently done as it is told and returned only the changes.
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.
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
> the classic 3rd space problem that Starbucks tackled
“Tackled” is misleading. “Leveraged to grow a customer base and then exacerbated to more efficiently monetize the same customer base” would be more accurate.
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.
Reddit is where people literally believed GPT5 was going to be AGI.
reddit is a large group of people sharing many diverse ideas
That was the r/singularity sub which has a rather large bias toward believing the singularity is near and inevitable.
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:
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.
But it always gives answers like that for questions where it doesn't know the actual reason.
> 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.
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.
Not everyone is an engineer. There's a substantial population that were selecting for maximum sycophancy.
> 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.
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)
Lower tiers have limited uses for some models.
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.
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?
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
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.
Really, you could say that social media alone was sort of what you're describing for the right people. Given enough time and energy they'd find that "match" in terms of a community or echo chamber or whatever that would reinforce some belief or introduce them into some broken feedback loop - it just took _humans_ as input.
This one only needs electricity and internet access.
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...
Yea I read through the Altman AMA...those people are absolutely serious.
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.
What is a Kpop whale?
She spends $10k+ a year on her favorite Kpop idol. Traveling worldwide to view his shows, buying him gifts etc.
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.
That's not a valid scale, "terrifying" and "interesting" are orthogonal. Some of the most interesting things are the most terrifying. This comment is around 8 on both scales for me.
Not OP but one is kind of interesting. It’s the “I said yes” posts with picture of engagement ring that are a 0 to me
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.
With major redesigns, you often can’t directly compare the two versions —- they are different enough that you actually want people to use them in a different way. So it’s not that the new version is “worse”, it’s just different, and it’s possible that there are some workflows that are functionally impossible on the new version (you’d be surprised how easy it is to mess this up.)
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.
Just read Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep, I’d highly recommend it. It’s quite different than Blade Runner. It leans much heavier into these kinds of themes, there’s a whole sort of religion about caring for animals and cultivating human empathy.
The book is worth reading and it's interesting how much they changed for the movie. I like having read the book, it makes certain sequences a little more impactful.
"Do your like our owl?"
"It's artificial?"
"Of course it is."
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?
It works as a tool. The main model (GPT-4o or GPT-5 or o3 or whatever) composes a prompt and passes that to the image model.
This means different top level models will get different results.
You can ask the model to tell you the prompt that it used, and it will answer, but there is no way of being 100% sure it is telling you the truth!
My hunch is that it is telling the truth though, because models are generally very good at repeating text from earlier in their context.
Source for this? My understanding was that this was true for dalle3, but that the autoregressive image generation just takes in the entire chat context — no hidden prompt.
Look at the leaked system prompts and you'll see the tool definition used for image generation.
I stand corrected! Thanks.
You know that unless you control for seed and temperature, you always get a different output for the same prompts even with the model unchanged... right?
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.
It is frustrating that it’ll still give a bad response sometimes, but I consider the variation in responses a feature. If it’s going down the wrong path, it’s nice to be able to roll the dice again and get it back on track.
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?
Temperature is a very basic concept that makes LLMs work as well as they do in the first place. That's just how it works and that's how it's been always supposed to work.
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.
That may be a more precise interpretation given the leaked system prompt, as the schema for the tool there includes a prompt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44832990
> 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.
It appears to be overtuned on extremy strict instruction following, interpreting things in a very unhuman way, which may be a benefit to agentic tasks at the costs of everything else.
My limited API testing with gpt-5 also showed this. As an example, the instruction "don't use academic language" caused it to basically omit half of what it output without that instruction. The other frontier models, and even open source Chinese ones like Kimi and Deepseek, understand perfectly fine what we mean by it.
It's not great at agentic tasks either. Not the least because it seems very timid about doing things on its own, and demands (not asks - demands) that user confirm every tiny step.
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.
I built this as a joke last time this complaint came up: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered
Thank you.
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.
That doesn’t stop manufacturers from getting rid of parts that have no real equivalent elsewhere in their catalog. Sometimes they do, but at the end of the day you’re at their mercy. Or you have strong enough ties to their management that they keep your product forever, even later when it’s hurting them to keep it.
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.
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.
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?
Now all those free users looking for 4o will sign up for Plus accounts.
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.
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.)
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
Am skeptical of the need to get rid of the model picker.
clunky Looking Product ≠ clunky ux
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.
If they are lying about changing model weights despite keeping the date-stamped model ID the same it would be a monumental lie.
Anthropic make most of their revenue from paid API usage. Their paying customers need to be able to trust them when they make clear statements about their model deprecation policy.
I'm going to chose to continue to believe them until someone shows me incontrovertible evidence that this isn't true.
Maybe they are not changing the model weights but they are making constant tweaks to the system prompt (which isn't in any way better, to be extremely clear).
That affects their consumer apps but not models accessed via their API.
Unlike other providers they do at least publish part of the system prompts - though they omit the tool section, I wish they'd publish the whole thing!
That's a very roundabout way to phrase "you're completely making all of this up", which is quite disappointing tbh. Are you familiar with evals? As in automated testing using multiple runs? It's simple regression testing, just like for deterministic code. Doing multiple runs smooths out any stochastic differences, and the change I explained isn't explainable by stochasticity regardless.
There is no evidence that would satisfy you then, as it would be exactly what I showed. You'd need a time machine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1gxa76p/claude_ap...
Here's just one thread.
I don't think you're making it up, but without a lot more details I can't be convinced that your methodology was robust enough to prove what you say it shows.
There IS evidence that would satisfy me, but I'd need to see it.
I will have a high bar for that though. A Reddit thread of screenshots from nine months ago doesn't do the trick for me.
(Having looked at that thread it doesn't look like a change in model weights to me, it looks more like a temporary capacity glitch in serving them.)
This was nothing but "temporary", it's still in place; the last time we ran the evals is 2 weeks ago and it's the exact same. It can't be a "capacity glitch" either, as it actually outputs those as proper tokens.
It's possible that it was an internal system prompt change despite the claims of "there is no system prompt on the API", but this is in effect the same as changing the model.
> There IS evidence that would satisfy me, but I'd need to see it.
Describe what this evidence would look like. It sure feels like an appeal to authority - if I'd be someone with a "name" I'm sure you'd believe it.
If you'd had had the same set of evals set up since then, you wouldn't have questioned this at all. You don't.
> I don't think you're making it up, but without a lot more details I can't be convinced that your methodology was robust enough to prove what you say it shows.
Go and poke holes at it then, go on. I've clearly explained the methodology.
If Anthropic made Deepthink 3.5 it would be AGI, I never use > 3.5
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.
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".)
(As a follow up, at some point the model selector on my phone also got the legacy submenu, and this is definitely the actual ChatGPT 4.5. I just started flipping back and forth between 5 and 4.5 on the same prompt, and it really makes me wish they would let me keep paying more for 4.5 usage.)
Just plus
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
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.
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.
Is it possible that this is the result of basically all the benchmarks being focused on coding (and a few standardized tests).
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.
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.
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 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=31704063
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
[1] https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598817
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
No, there are two things called GPT-5 (this is classic OpenAI, see also Codex).
There's GPT-5 the system, a new model routing mechanism that is part of their ChatGPT consumer product.
There's also a new model called GPT-5 which is available via their API: https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-5
(And two other named API models, GPT-5 mini and GPT-5 nano - part of the GPT-5 model family).
AND there's GPT-5 Pro, which isn't available via the API but can be accessed via ChatGPT for $200/month subscribers.
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