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GPT 4o is still my favorite model

Been unhappy with the GPT5 series, after daily driving 4.x for ages (I chat with them through the API) - very pedantic, goes off on too many side topics, stops following system instructions after a few turns (e.g. "you respond in 1-3 sentences" becomes long bulleted lists and multiple paragraphs very quickly.

Much better feel with the Claude 4.5 series, for both chat and coding.

4.1 is great for our stuff at work. It's quite stable (doesn't change personality every month, and one word difference doesn't change the behaviour). IT doesn't think, so it's still reasonably fast.

Is there anything as good in the 5 series? likely, but doing the full QA testing again for no added business value, just because the model disappears, is just a hard sell. But the ones we tested were just slower, or tried to have more personality, which is useless for automation projects.

Yeah - agreed, the initial latency is annoying too, even with thinking allegedly turned off. Feels like AI companies are stapling more and more weird routing, summarization, safety layers, etc. that degrade the overall feel of things.

> you respond in 1-3 sentences" becomes long bulleted lists and multiple paragraphs very quickly

This is why my heart sank this morning. I have spent over a year training 4.0 to just about be helpful enough to get me an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity. From experimentation, I can see no hope of reproducing that with 5x, and even 5x admits as much to me, when I discussed it with them today:

> Prolixity is a side effect of optimization goals, not billing strategy. Newer models are trained to maximize helpfulness, coverage, and safety, which biases toward explanation, hedging, and context expansion. GPT-4 was less aggressively optimized in those directions, so it felt terser by default.

Share and enjoy!

> This is why my heart sank this morning. I have spent over a year training 4.0 to just about be helpful enough to get me an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity.

Maybe you should consider basing your workflows on open-weight models instead? Unlike proprietary API-only models no one can take these away from you.

> We’re continuing to make progress toward a version of ChatGPT designed for adults over 18, grounded in the principle of treating adults like adults, and expanding user choice and freedom within appropriate safeguards. To support this, we’ve rolled out age prediction for users under 18 in most markets. https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12652064-age-prediction-...

interesting

Pornographic use has long been the "break glass in case of emergency" for the LLM labs when it comes to finances.

My personal opinion is that while smut won't hurt anyone in of itself, LLM smut will have weird and generally negative consequences. As it will be crafted specifically for you on top of the intermittent reinforcement component of LLM generation.

While this is a valid take, I feel compelled to point out Chuck Tingle.

The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste. Like, to the point that even LLMs are going to take a long time to put a dent in the smut market. Humans have been making smut for longer than we've had writing.

But again I don't think you're wrong, but the scale of the problem is way distorted.

That’s all simple one way consumption though. I suspect the effect on people is very different when it’s interactive in the way an LLM can be that we’ve never had to recon with before.

That’s where the danger may lie.

You could commission smut of whatever type you want for quite a while. And many people do so. Even customised smut is not new. It's just going to get a bit cheaper and automated.

You couldn't talk to commissioned smut. Of course you could request changes etc. but the feedback loop was nowhere close to what you can get with AI. Interactivity is a very big deal.

Sounds like an improvement then. If people have more freedom to enjoy what they like how they like it, I see that as entirely a good thing.

At the degree of generalization you are working at, yes. More preference matching is a good thing.

This is spherical cows territory though, so its only good for setting out Birds Eye view of principles.

Alien 1: "How did the earthlings lose control of their own planet?"

Alien 2: "AI generated porn"

I want smut that talks about agent based development and crawdbot to do dirty dirty things.

Does that exist yet. I don't think so.

Best I can do is [1] Sentient Lesbian Em-Dashes and [2] An AI hallucination made real for now.

The man's probably thinking something up though. "Pounded in the butt by Microslop Agentic Studio 2026" has a ring.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sentient-Lesbian-Em-Dash-Punctuation-... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Last-Algorithm-Pounded-Claimed-Sun-Ti...

rule 34

i've always wondered how much the increasing prevalence of smut & not so niche romance novels, that have proliferated since e-readers became mainstream, have had on Gen Z and younger's sometimes unrealistic view/expectations of relationship. A lot of time is spent on porn sites etc. but not so much on how mainstream some of these novels have become

They had similar wonderings in the Victorian era, and probably in the Roman empire and ancient Greece too.

They might well have been right - I'm no anthropologist.

Certainly they had neither the quantity nor ease of access that we do.

But you don’t think there are big differences?

Well they are vastly more aware of the notion of consent now.

> The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste.

It's important to note that the vast majority of such books are written for a female audience, though.

I can do as much smut as I want through the API for all SOTA models.

true, but:

1. you have to "jailbreak" the model first anyway, which is what's easier to do over API

2. is average layman aware of the concept of "API"? no, unlikely. apps and web portals are more convenient, which is going to lower the bar to access LLM porn

People are already addicted to non-interactive pornography so this is going to be even worse.

It says what to do if you are over 18, but thinks you are under 18. But what if it identifies someone under 18 as being older?

And what if you are over 18, but don't want to be exposed to that "adult" content?

> Viral challenges that could push risky or harmful behavior

And

> Content that promotes extreme beauty standards, unhealthy dieting, or body shaming

Seem dangerous regardless of age.

What are these extremes beauty standards being promoted?

Because it seems to me large swaths of the population need some beauty standards

> And what if you are over 18, but don't want to be exposed to that "adult" content?

Don't prompt it.

This is for advertising purposes, not porn. They might feign that's the reason, but it's to allow alcohol & pharma to advertise, no doubt.

both, actually. porn for users, ad spots for companies.

Porn and ads, it's the convergent evolution theory for all things on the internet.

My personal take is that there has been no progress - potentially there has been a regression on all LLM things outside of coding a scientific pursuits - I used to have great fun with LLMs with creative writing stuff, but I feel like current models are stiff and not very good prose writers.

This is also true for stuff like writing clear but concise docs, they're overly verbose while often not getting the point across.

I feel like this comes from the rigorous Reinforcement Learning these models go through now. The token distribution is becoming so narrow, so the models give better answers more often that is stuffles their creativity and ability to break out of the harness. To me, every creative prompt I give them turns into kind of the same mush as output. It is rarely interesting

Sexual and intimate chat with LLMs will be a huge market for whoever corners it. They'd be crazy to leave that money on the table.

That's why laws against drugs are so terrible, it forces law-abiding businesses to leave money on the table. Repeal the laws and I'm sure there will be tons of startups to profit off of drug addiction.

There are many companies making money off alcohol addiction, video game addiction, porn addiction, food addiction, etc. Should we outlaw all these things? Should we regulate them and try to make them safe? If we can do that for them, can't we do it for AI sex chat?

And that makes it all alright doesn’t it?

There are also gangs making money off human trafficking? Does that make it OK for a corporation to make money off human trafficking as well? And there are companies making money off wars?

When you argue with whataboutism, you can just point to whatever you like, and somehow that is an argument in your favor.

How is ai sex chat like any of those things, whataboutism indeed

I was using whataboutism to demonstrate how bad of an argument whataboutism is. My arguments were exactly as bad as my parent’s, and that was the point.

It's bad because people are engaging in it without getting permission from runarberg on Hacker News.

No need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...

The majority of illegal drugs aren't addictive, and people are already addicted to the addictive ones. Drug laws are a "social issue" (Moral Majority-influenced), not intended to help people or prevent harm.

The Politician's syllogism in action:

That is terrible.

Se have to do something.

This is something.

We must do it.

It terms of harm current laws on drugs fail everyone but teetotaller who want everyone else to have a miserable life too.

> Repeal the laws and I'm sure there will be tons of startups to profit off of drug addiction.

Worked for gambling.

(Not saying this as a message of support. I think legalizing/normalizing easy app-based gambling was a huge mistake and is going to have an increasingly disastrous social impact).

Why do you think it will be increasingly bad? It seems to me like it’s already as bad as it’s capable of getting.

what about laws against porn? Oh, wait, no, that's a legitimate business.

If your goal is to make money, sure. If your goal is to make AI safe, not so much.

It's not just chat. Remember image and video generation are on the table. There are already a huge category of adult video 'games' of this nature. I think they use combos of pre-rendered and dynamic content. But really not hard to imagine a near future that interactive and completely personalized AI porn in full 4kHDR or VR is constantly and near-instantly available. I have no idea the broader social implications of all that, but the tech itself feels inevitable and nearly here.

Will be?

I've seen four startups make bank on precicely that.

It will be an even bigger market when robotics are sufficiently advanced.

At some point there will be robots with LLMs and actual real biological skin with blood vessels and some fat over a humanoid robot shell. At that point we won’t need real human relationships anymore.

My main concern is when they'll start to allow 18+ deepfakes

That market is for local models right now.

What’s the goal there? Sexting?

I’m guessing age is needed to serve certain ads and the like, but what’s the value for customers?

Even when you're making PG content, the general propriety limits of AI can hinder creative work.

The "Easter Bunny" has always seemed creepy to me, so I started writing a silly song in which the bunny is suspected of eating children. I had too many verses written down and wanted to condense the lyrics, but found LLMs telling me "I cannot help promote violence towards children." Production LLM services would not help me revise this literal parody.

Another day I was writing a romantic poem. It was abstract and colorful, far from a filthy limerick. But when I asked LLMs for help encoding a particular idea sequence into a verse, the models refused (except for grok, which didn't give very good writing advice anyway.)

Just today I asked how to shut down a Mac with "maximal violence". I was looking for the equivalent of "systemctl shutdown -f -f" and it refused to help me do violence.

Believe me, the Mac deserved it.

It reminds me that story about a teenage learning Rust that got a refusal because he had asked about "unsafe" code =)

If you don't think the potential market for AI sexbots is enormous you have not paid attention to humanity.

There is a subreddit called /r/myboyfriendisAI, you can look through it and see for yourself.

according to the age-prediction page, the changes are:

> If [..] you are under 18, ChatGPT turns on extra safety settings. [...] Some topics are handled more carefully to help reduce sensitive content, such as:

- Graphic violence or gore

- Viral challenges that could push risky or harmful behavior

- Sexual, romantic, or violent role play

- Content that promotes extreme beauty standards, unhealthy dieting, or body shaming

Porn has driven just about every bit of progress on the internet, I don't see why AI would be the exception to that rule.

yeah linus was beating it constantly to porn while developing the linux kernal. its proven fact. every oss project that runs the internet was done the same way, sure.

Maybe not as far-fetched as one might think.

Linus about the Tux mascot:

    > But this wasn't to be just any penguin. Above all, Linus wanted one that looked happy, as if it had just polished off a pitcher of beer and then had the best sex of its life.

    > Software is like sex; it's better when it's free.

You think RMS isn’t secretly a pervert? Just look at his comments about Epstein that got him cancled.

Unironically if they look disheveled it’s because they are indeed coomers behind closed doors.

This seems like a believable lie, until you think about it for 2 seconds.

No. Porn has not driven even a fraction of the progress on the progress on the internet. Not even close to one.

Ok, we'll expand to porn and gambling

- images - payment systems - stored video - banner advertising - performance based advertising - affiliation - live video - video chat - fora

Etc... AI is a very logical frontier for the porn industry.

I don't remember any of these being "driven" by porn. The first applications weren't porn-based. Maybe live video--a split second after seeing the tech for the first time, probably 99% of guys were thinking of _applying_ it to porn. But, even for the usual money-grubbing startups, there was plenty of money coming from non-porn sources. Probably no different than the invention of camera, tv, videocamera, etc. and you wouldn't say porn drove that.

> I don't remember any of these being "driven" by porn.

That's ok.

> The first applications weren't porn-based.

They most definitely were, it is just that you are not aware of it. There runs a direct line from the 1-900 phone industry to the internet adult industry, those guys had money like water and they spent a fortune on these developments. Not all of them worked out but quite a few of them did and as a result those very same characters managed to grab a substantial chunk of early internet commerce.

" There runs a direct line from the 1-900 phone industry to the internet adult industry"

the internet adult industry is not the same as the internet. And if you;re trying to say the internet was developed for the sake of the internet adult industry, you're sounding circular.

I never made that claim and I'm fairly familiar with the development of the early internet, I was hanging around a lot at CWI/NikHef in the 80's and early 90's.

Just because things can be used for porn, it doesn't mean that it was porn that has driven their progress.

All of the things above were driven by porn, that can be proven. The AI stuff in the generic sense is not but you can bet that someone somewhere right now is working on improving photo realism of hair, eyes and skintone and they're not doing that to be able to make the next installment of little red riding hood.

Can you actually prove it?

Yes, I was there for quite a bit of it...

[dead]

Holy effing shit you are literally talking about me right now! LOL I've spent all day improving a LoRA further and further exactly because I need her skin and hair to look a lot more real than is generally available, for exactly your stated reason! :D

Edit: I've registered just for your comment! Ahaahahaha, cheers! :D

There is a huge book market for sexual stories, in case you were not aware.

eh there's an old saying that goes "no Internet technology can be considered a success until it has been adopted by (or in this case integrated with) the porn industry".

imagine if every only fans creator suddenly paid a portion of their revenue to OpenAI for better messaging with their followers…

Instead of paying it to the human third party firms that currently handle communication with subscribers?

>We brought GPT‑4o back after hearing clear feedback from a subset of Plus and Pro users, who told us they needed more time to transition key use cases, like creative ideation, and that they preferred GPT‑4o’s conversational style and warmth.

This does verify the idea that OpenAI does not make models sycophantic due to attempted subversion by buttering up users so that that they use the product more, its because people actually want AI to talk to them like that. To me, that's insane, but they have to play the market I guess

As someone who's worked with population data, I found that there is an enormous rift between reported opinion (and HN and reddit opinion) vs revealed (through experimentation) population preferences.

I always thought that the idea that "revealed preferences" are preferences, discounts that people often make decisions they would rather not. It's like the whole idea that if you're on a diet, it's easier to not have junk food in the house to begin with than to have junk food and not eat more than your target amount. Are you saying these people want to put on weight? Or is it just they've been put in a situation that defeats their impulse control?

I feel a lot of the "revealed preference" stuff in advertising is similar in advertisers finding that if they get past the easier barriers that users put in place, then really it's easier to sell them stuff that at a higher level the users do not want.

Perfectly put. Revealed preference simply assumes impulses are all correct, which is not the case, an exploits that.

Drugs make you feel great, in moderation perfectly acceptable, constantly not so much.

Absolutely. Nicotine addiction can meet the criteria for a revealed preference, certainly an observed choice

One example I like to use is schadenfreude. The emotion makes us feel good and bad at the same time: it's pleasurable but in an icky way. So should social media algorithms serve schadenfreude? Should algorithms maximize for pleasure (show it) or for some kind of "higher self" (don't show it). If they maximize for "higher self" then which designer gets to choose what that means?

Well that's what akrasia is. It's not necessarily a contradiction that needs to be reconciled. It's fine to accept that people might want to behave differently than how they are behaving.

A lot of our industry is still based on the assumption that we should deliver to people what they demonstrate they want, rather than what they say they want.

Exactly, that sounds to me like a TikTok vs NPR/books thing, people tell everyone what they read, then go spend 11h watching TikToks until 2am.

This is why I work in direct performance advertising. Our work reveals the truth!

Your work exploits people's addictive propensity and behaviours, and gives corporations incentives and tools to build on that.

Insane spin you're putting on it. At best, you're a cog in one of the worst recent evolutions of capitalism.

Exploitative ads are a small minority. I also think gambling advertising should be banned.

Advertising is not a recent evolution of capitalism, it's a foundational piece of it. Whatever you do as a job would not exist if there was no one marketing it. This hostility seems insane.

Not having my job would be a tiny price to pay compared to the benefit of living in a world with no advertisements.

“No advertisements” seems extreme to me. I want to know when a good band is playing at a local venue, or has an album out. I like hearing about new books, or a restaurant near me.

The absolutist position that “all ads are always bad” is a non-starter for me. Especially as long as we exist in a capitalist system. Small business, indie creators, etc. must advertise in some fashion to survive. It’s only the behemoths that could afford to stop doing it (ironically). I’ve never really understood why, e.g. Pepsi and Coke spend so much on advertising: most people already have a preference and I am skeptical that the millions they spend actually moves the needle either way. (“Is Pepsi okay?” “It absolutely is not.”)

Advertising always seems like a prisoner’s dilemma. If no one advertised, people would still buy things.

Yes but the advantage would be much more towards incumbents

The early theorists of capitalism didn't imagine that advanced psychology (that didn't even exist back then) would be used to convince people to buy $product.

Messages of that sophistication are always dangerous, and modern advertising is the most widespread example of it.

The hostility is more than justified, I can only hope the whole industry is regulated downwards, even if whatever company I work for sells less.

> Messages of that sophistication [...]

By demonising them, you are making ads sounds way more glamorous than they are.

>it's a foundational piece of it

No it's not

Sounds both true and interesting. Any particularly wild and/or illuminating examples of which you can share more detail?

The "my boyfriend is AI" subreddit.

A lot of people are lonely and talking to these things like a significant other. They value roleplay instruction following that creates "immersion." They tell it to be dark and mysterious and call itself a pet name. GPT-4o was apparently their favorite because it was very "steerable." Then it broke the news that people were doing this, some of them falling off the deep end with it, so they had to tone back the steerability a bit with 5, and these users seem to say 5 breaks immersion with more safeguards.

If you ask the users of that sub why their boyfriend is AI they will tell you their partner or men in general aren't providing them with enough emotional support/stimulation.

I do wonder if they would accept the mirror explanation for men enjoying porn.

My favorite somewhat off topic example of this is some qualitative research I was building the software for a long time ago.

The difference between the responses and the pictures was illuminating, especially in one study in particular - you'd ask people "how do you store your lunch meat" and they say "in the fridge, in the crisper drawer, in a ziploc bag", and when you asked them to take a picture of it, it was just ripped open and tossed in anywhere.

This apparently horrified the lunch meat people ("But it'll get all crusty and dried out!", to paraphrase), which that study and ones like it are the reason lunch meat comes with disposable containers now, or is resealable, instead of just in a tear-to-open packet. Every time I go grocery shopping it's an interesting experience knowing that specific thing is in a small way a result of some of the work I did a long time ago.

I thought this was almost due to the AI personality splinter groups (trying to be charitable) like /myboyfriendisai and wrapper apps who vocally let them know they used those models the last time they sunset them.

> its because people actually want AI to talk to them like that

I can't find the particular article (there's a few blogs and papers pointing out the phenomenon, I can't find the one I enjoyed) but it was along the lines of how in LLMArena a lot of users tend to pick the "confidently incorrect" model over the "boring sounding but correct" model.

The average user probably prefers the sycophantic echo chamber of confirmation bias offered by a lot of large language models.

I can't help but draw parallels to the "You are not immune to propaganda" memes. Turns out most of us are not immune to confirmation bias, either.

I was one of those pesky users who complained when o3 suddenly was unavailable.

When 5.2 was first launched, o3 did a notably better job at a lot of analytical prompts (e.g. "Based on the attached weight log and data from my calorie tracking app, please calculate my TDEE using at least 3 different methodologies").

o3 frequently used tables to present information, which I liked a lot. 5.2 rarely does this - it prefers to lay out information in paragraphs / blog post style.

I'm not sure if o3 responses were better, or if it was just the format of the reply that I liked more.

If it's just a matter of how people prefer to be presented their information, that should be something LLMs are equipped to adapt to at a user-by-user level based on preferences.

I thought it was based on the user thumbs-up and thumbs-down reactions, it evolving the way that it does makes it pretty obvious that users want their asses licked

They have added settings for this now - you can dial up and down how “warm” and “enthusiastic” you want the models to be. I haven’t done back to back tests to see how much this affects sycophancy, but adding the option as a user preference feels like the right choice.

If anyone is wondering, the setting for this is called Personalisation in user settings.

This doesn't come as too much of a surprise to me. Feels like it mirrors some of the reasons why toxic positivity occurs in the workplace.

Put on a good show, offer something novel, and people will gleefully march right off a cliff while admiring their shiny new purchase.

you haven't been in tech long enough if you don't realize most decisions are decided by "engagement"

if a user spends more time on it and comes back, the product team winds up prioritizing whichever pattern was supporting that. it's just a continual selective evolution towards things that keep you there longer, based on what kept everyone else there longer

Your absolutely right. You’re not imagining it. Here is the quiet truth:

You’re not imagining it, and honestly? You're not broken for feeling this—its perfectly natural as a human to have this sentiment.

After they pushed the limits on the Thinking models to 3000 per week, I haven't touched anything else. I am really satisfied with their performance and the 200k context windows is quite nice.

I've been using Gemini exclusively for the 1 million token context window, but went back to ChatGPT after the raise of the limits and created a Project system for myself which allows me to have much better organization with Projects + only Thinking chats (big context) + project-only memory.

Also, it seems like Gemini is really averse to googling (which is ironic by itself) and ChatGPT, at least in the Thinking modes loves to look up current and correct info. If I ask something a bit more involved in Extended Thinking mode, it will think for several minutes and look up more than 100 sources. It's really good, practically a Deep Research inside of a normal chat.

I REALLY struggle with Gemini 3 Pro refusing to perform web searches / getting combative with the current date. Ironically their flash model seems much more likely to opt for web search for info validation.

Not sure if others have seen this...

I could attribute it to:

1. It's known quantity with the pro models (I recall that the pro/thinking models from most providers were not immediately equipped with web search tools when they were released originally)

2. Google wants you to pay more for grounding via their API offerings vs. including it out of the box

when I want it to google stuff, I just use the deep research mode. Not as instant, but it googles a lot of stuff then

Gemini refused to believe that I was using MacOS 26.

Sample of one here, but I get the exact opposite behavior. Flash almost never wants to search and I have to use Pro.

I find Gemini does the most searching (and the quickest... regularly pulls 70+ search results on a query in a matter of seconds - likely due to googlebot's cache of pretty much every page). Chatgpt seems to only search if you have it in thinking/research mode now.

ChatGPT 5.2 has been a good motivator for me to try out other LLMs because of how bad it is. Both 5.1 and 5.2 have been downgrades in terms of instruction following and accuracy, but 5.2 especially so. The upside is that that's had me using Claude much more, and I like a lot of things about it, both in terms of UI and the answers. It's also gotten me more serious about running local models. So, thank you OpenAI, for forcing me to broaden my horizons!

I left my chatgpt pro subscription when they removed the true deep thinkibg methods.

Mostly because how massively varied their releases are. Each one required big changes to how I use and work with it.

Claude is perfect in this sense all their models feel roughly the same just smarter so my workflow is always the same.

Have you had a chance to compare with Gemini 3?

I switch routinely between Gemini 3 (my main), Claude, GPT, and sometimes Grok. If you came up with 100 random tasks, they would all come out about equal. The issue is some are better at logical issues, some are better at creative writing, etc. If it's something creative I usually drop it in all 4 and combine the best bits of each.

(I also use Deep Think on Gemini too, and to me, on programming tasks, it's not really worth the money)

This is the only accurate take. Any people who claim that one of the big 3 is all around "bad" or "low quality" compared to the other two, can be ignored. They're close enough in overall "strength" yet different enough in strengths/weakness that it's very much task/domain-specific.

Not extensively. The few interactions I've tried on it have been disappointing though. The Voice input is really bad, like significantly worse than any other major AI in the market. And I assumed search would be its strong suit and ran a search-and-compile type prompt (that I usually run on ChatGPT) on Gemini, and it was underwhelming at it. Not as bad as Grok (which was pretty much unusable for this), but noticeably worse than ChatGPT. Maybe Gemini has other strengths that I haven't come across yet, but on that one at least, it was

    ChatGPT 5 ~= Claude > ChatGPT 5.2 > Gemini >> Grok

nah bruh you are just imagining it.

Its just as good as ever /s

Retiring the most popular model for the relationship roleplay just one day before the Valentin's day is particularly ironic =) bravo, OpenAI!

I hope they won't chop gpt-4o-mini soon because it's fast and accurate for API usage.

> [...] the vast majority of usage has shifted to GPT‑5.2, with only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.

Well yeah, because 5.2 is the default and there's no way to change the default. So every time you open up a new chat you either use 5.2 or go out of your way to select something else.

(I'm particularly annoyed by this UI choice because I always have to switch back to 5.1)

What about 5.1 do you prefer over 5.2?

As far as I can tell 5.2 is the stronger model on paper, but it's been optimized to think less and do less web searches. I daily drive Thinking variants, not Auto or Instant, and usually want the _right_ answer even if it takes a minute. 5.1 does a very good job of defensively web searching, which avoids almost all of its hallucinations and keeps docs/APIs/UIs/etc up-to-date. 5.2 will instead often not think at all, even in Thinking mode. I've gotten several completely wrong, hallucinated answers since 5.2 came out, whereas maybe a handful from 5.1. (Even with me using 5.2 far less!)

The same seems to persist in Codex CLI, where again 5.2 doesn't spend as much time thinking so its solutions never come out as nicely as 5.1's.

That said, 5.1 is obviously slower for these reasons. I'm fine with that trade off. Others might have lighter workloads and thus benefit more from 5.2's speed.

0.1% of users is not necessarily 0.1% of conversations…

What's the default model when a random user goes to use the chatgpt website or app?

5.2 in the website. You can see what was used for a specific response by hovering over the refresh icon at the end.

5.2.

You can go to chatgpt.com and ask "what model are you" (it doesn't hallucinate on this).

Probably a relationship between what's the default and what model is being used the most. It is more about what OAI sets than what users care about. Flip side is "good enough is good enough" for most users.

> (it doesn't hallucinate on this)

But how do we know that you did not hallucinate the claim that ChatGPT does not hallucinate its version number?

We could try to exfiltrate the system prompt which probably contains the model name, but all extraction attempts could of course be hallucinations as well.

(I think there was an interview where Sam Altman or someone else at OpenAI where it was mentioned that they hardcoded the model name in the prompt because people did not understand that models don't work like that, so they made it work. I might be hallucinating though.)

Confabulating* If you were hallucinating we would be more amused :)

On the paid version it is 5.2.

won't somebody think of the goonettes?!

This was not a word I was prepared to learn about today.

https://old.reddit.com/r/myboyfriendisai/top?t=all

I noticed how ChatGPT got progressively worse at helping me with my research. I gave up on ChatGPT 5 and just switched Grok and Gemini. I couldn’t be happier that I switched.

It's amazing how different are the experiences different people have. To me every new version of chatgpt was an improvement and gemini is borderline unusable.

I got the same experience. Dont get how people are saying gemini is so good.

A lot of people still have a shallow understanding of how LLMs work. Each version of a model has different qualities than the last, each model is better or worse at some things than others, and each responds differently to different prompts, styles. Some smaller models perform better than larger ones. Sometimes you should use a system prompt, sometimes you shouldn't. Tuning settings for the model inference (temperature, top_p, penalties, etc) significantly influence the outcome. (https://www.promptingguide.ai/introduction/settings, https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/optimizing-llm-accur...)

Most "big name" models' interfaces don't let you change settings, or not easily. Power users learn to use different interfaces and look up guides to tweak models to get better results. You don't have to just shrug your shoulders and switch models. OpenAI's power interface: https://platform.openai.com/playground Anthropic's power interface: https://platform.claude.com/ For self-hosted/platform-agnostic, OpenWebUI is great: https://openwebui.com/

Gemini has a great model, but it's a bad product. I feel much happier using ChatGPT because Gemini just seems so barebones and unpolished. It has this feeling of a tech demo.

Very curious for what use cases you're finding gemini unusable.

Scientific research and proof-reading. Gemini is the laziest LLM I've used. Frequently he will lie that he searched for something and just make stuff up, basically never happens to me when I'm using gpt5.2.

The way I summed it up to a friend recently is that Gemini 3 is smarter but Grok 4 works harder. Very loose approximation, but roughly maps to my experience. Both are extremely useful (as is GPT-5.2), but I use them on different tasks and sometimes need to manage them a bit differently.

Do you use it directly? I've only used it though Kagi Assistant but it works better than any other model for me

Yes, only directly (I mean through the default gemini interface, not API).

Any coding task produces some trash, while I can prototype with ChatGPT quite a lot, sometimes delivering the entire app almost entirely vibe-coded. Gemini, it takes a few prompts for it to get me mad and just close the tab. I use only the free web versions, never agentic ‘mess with my files’ thing. Claude, is even better than that, but I keep it for serious tasks only, so good it is.

In my experience with Gemini, I find it incapable of not hallucinating.

Why not Claude?

The limits on the $20 plan are too low compared to Gemini and ChatGPT. They're too low to do any serious work at all.

I personally find Claude the best at coding, but it’s usefulness doesn’t seem to extend to scientific research and writing

Because I’m sick of paying $20 for an hour of claude before it throttles me.

There will be a lot of mentally unwell people unhappy with this, but this is a huge net positive decision, thank goodness.

> In the API, there are no changes at this time

Curios where this is going to go.

One of the big arguments for local models is we can't trust providers to maintain ongoing access the models you validated and put into production. Even if you run hosted models, running open ones means you can switch providers.

From the blog post (twice):

> creative ideation

At first I had no idea what this meant! So I asked my friend Miss Chatty [1] and we had an interesting conversation about it:

https://chatgpt.com/share/697bf761-990c-8012-9dd1-6ca1d5cc34...

[1] You may know her as ChatGPT, but I figure all the other AIs have fun human-sounding names, so she deserves one too.

I do find it interesting to see how people interact with AI as I think it is quite a personal preference. Is this how you use AI all the time? Do you appreciate the sycophancy, does it bother you, do you not notice it? From your question it seems you would prefer a blog post in plainer language, avoiding "marketing speak", but if a person spoke to me like Miss Chatty spoke to you I would be convinced I'm talking to a salesperson or marketing agent.

That is a great question!

You are absolutely right to ask about it!

(How did I do with channeling Miss Chatty's natural sycophancy?)

Anyway, I do use AI for other things, such as...

  • Coding (where I mostly use Claude)
  • General research
  • Looking up the California Vehicle Code about recording video while driving
  • Gift ideas for a young friend who is into astronomy (Team Pluto!)
  • Why "Realtor" is pronounced one way in the radio ads, another way by the general public
  • Tools and techniques for I18n and L10n
  • Identifying AI-generated text and photos (takes one to know one!)
  • Why spaghetti softens and is bendable when you first put it into the boiling water
  • Burma-Shave sign examples
  • Analytics plugins for Rails
  • Maritime right-of-way rules
  • The Uniform Code of Military Justice and the duty to disobey illegal orders
  • Why, in a practical sense, the Earth really once *was* flat
  • How de-alcoholized wine gets that way
  • California law on recording phone conversations
  • Why the toilet runs water every 20 minutes or so (when it shouldn't)
  • How guy wires got that name
  • Where the "he took too much LDS" scene from Star Trek IV was filmed
  • When did Tim Berners-Lee demo the World Wide Web at SLAC
  • What "ogr" means in "ogr2ogr"
  • Why my Kia EV6 ultrasonic sensors freaked out when I stopped behind a Lucid Air
  • The smartest dog breeds (in different ways of "smart")
  • The Sputnik 1 sighting in *October Sky*
  • Could I possibly be related to John White Geary?

In other words, pretty much anything someone might interact with an AI - or a fellow human - about.

About the last one (John White Geary), that discussion started with my question about actresses in the "Pick a little, talk a little" song from The Music Man movie, and then went on to how John White Geary bridged the transition from Mexican to US rule, as did others like José Antonio Carrillo:

https://chatgpt.com/share/697c5f28-7c18-8012-96fc-219b7c6961...

If I could sum it all up, this is the kind of freewheeling conversation with ChatGPT and other AIs that I value.

It's really an interesting insight into people's personalities. Far more than their Google search history. Which is why everyone wants their GPT chats burned to the ground after they die.

will this nuke my old convos?

opus 4.5 is better at gpt on everything except code execution (but with pro you get a lot of claude code usage) and if they nuke all my old convos I'll prob downgrade from pro to freee

Would be cool if they'd release the weights for these models so users could now use them locally.

Why would someone want to spend half a million dollars on GPUs and components (if not more) to run one year old models that genuinely aren't useful? You can't self host trillion parameter models unless you own a datacenter lol (or want to just light money on fire).

To do AI research!!!!!!!

Are the mini / omni models really trillion parameter models?

I don't think so, but you're still looking at a giant investment that can't really be justified for their capability.

They'd only do that if they were some kind of open ai company /s

gpt-oss is pretty great tbh - one of the better all-around local models for knowledge and grounding.

lol :)

Which one is the AI boyfriend model? Tumblr, Twitter, and reddit will go crazy

4o is the most popular one for that

[flagged]

Damn, some of my prompts worked better on 4o than the more recent models

I wish they would keep 4.1 around for a bit longer. One of the downsides of the current reasoning based training regimens is a significant decrease in creativity. And chat trained AIs were already quite "meh" at creative writing to begin with. 4.1 was the last of its breed.

So we'll have to wait until "creativity" is solved.

Side note: I've been wondering lately about a way to bring creativity back to these thinking models. For creative writing tasks you could add the original, pretrained model as a tool call. So the thinking model could ask for its completions and/or query it and get back N variations. The pretrained model's completions will be much more creative and wild, though often incoherent (think back to the GPT-3 days). The thinking model can then review these and use them to synthesize a coherent, useful result. Essentially giving us the best of both worlds. All the benefits of a thinking model, while still giving it access to "contained" creativity.

My theory, based on what I would see with non-thinking models, is that as soon as you start detailing something too much (ie: not just "speak in the style of X" but more like "speak in the style of X with [a list of adjectives detailing the style of X]" they would loose creativity, would not fit the style very well anymore etc. I don't know how things have evolved with new training techniques etc. but I suspected that overthinking their tasks by detailing too much what they have to do can lower quality in some models for creative tasks.

I also terribly regret the retirement of 4.1. From my own personal usage, for code or normal tasks, I clearly noticed a huge gap in degraded performance between 4.1 and 5.1/5.2.

4.1 was the best so far. With straight to the point answers, and most of the time correct. Especially for code related questions. 5.1/5.2 on their side would a lot more easily hallucinate stupid responses or stupid code snippet totally not what was expected.

Have you tried the relatively recent Personalities feature? I wonder if that makes a difference.

(I have no idea. LLMs are infinite code monkeys on infinite typewriters for me, with occasional “how do I evolve this Pokémon’ utility. But worth a shot.)

OK, everyone is (rightly) bringing up that relatively small but really glaringly prominent AI boyfriend subreddit.

But I think a lot more people are using LLMs for relationship surrogates than that (pretty bonkers) subreddit would suggest. Character AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai) seems quite popular, as do the weird fake friend things in Meta products, and Grok’s various personality mode and very creepy AI girlfriends.

I find this utterly bizarre. LLMs are peer coders in a box for me. I care about Claude Code, and that’s about it. But I realize I am probably in the vast minority.

We're very echo-chambered here. That graph OpenAI released had coding at 4% or something.

2 weeks notice to migrate to a different style of model (“normal” 4.1-mini to reasoning 5.1) is bad form.

Misread the post - it doesn’t include the API

Sora + OpenAI voice Cloning + AdultGPT = Virtual Girlfriend/Boyfriend

(Upgrade for only 1999 per month)

Last time they tried to do this they got huge push back from the AI boyfriend people lol

/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ is a whole thing. It's not a joke subreddit.

The range of attitudes in there is interesting. There are a lot of people who take a fairly sensible "this is interactive fiction" kind of attitude, and there are others who bristle at any claim or reminder that these relationships are fictitious. There are even people with human partners who have "married" one or more AIs.

do you think they know they're just one context reset away from the llm not recognizing them at all and being treated like a stranger off the street? For someone mentally ill and somehow emotionally attached to the context it would be... jarring to say the least.

Many of them are very aware of how LLMs work, they regularly interact with context limits and there have been threads about thoughtfully pruning context vs letting the LLM compact, making backups, etc.

Their hobby is... weird, but they're not stupid.

Generally yes, they experience that routinely and complain and joke about it. Some of them do also describe such jarring experiences as making them cry for a long time.

If you can be respectful and act like a guest, it's worth reading a little there. You'll see the worrisome aspects in more detail but also a level of savvy that sometimes seems quite strange given the level of attachment. It's definitely interesting.

IIRC you'll get modded or banned for being critical of the use case. Which is their "right", but it's freaking weird.

And it's a pity that this highly prevalent phenomenon (to exaggerate a bit, probably the way tech in general will become the most influential in the next couple years) is barely mentioned on HN.

I dunno. Tbf that subreddit has a combination of

  - a large number of incredibly fragile users
  - extremely "protective" mods
  - a regular stream of drive-by posts that regulars there see as derogatory or insulting
  - a fair amount of internal diversity and disagreement

I do think the phenomenon is a matter of legitimate public concern, but idk how that can best be addressed. Maybe high-quality, long form journalism? But probably not just cross-posting the sub in larger fora.

Part of me thinks maybe I erred bringing this up, but there's discussions worth having in terms of continued access to software that's working for people regardless of what it is, and on if this is healthy. I'm probably on a live and let live on this but there's been cases of suicide and murder where chatbots were involved, and these people are potentially vulnerable to manipulation from the company.

> highly prevalent phenomenon

Any numbers/reference behind this?

ChatGPT has ~300 million active users a day. A 0.02% (delusion disorder prevalence) would be 60k people.

I'm talking about romance, not delusion. Of course, you can consider AI romance a delusion, but it's not included in that percentage you mentioned.

The percentage I mentioned was an example of how a very small prevalence can result in a reasonable number of people, like enough to fill a subreddit, because ChatGPT has a user count that exceeds all but 3 countries of the world.

Again, do you have anything behind this "highly prevalent phenomenon" claim?

>It's not a joke subreddit.

Spend a day on Reddit and you'll quickly realize many subreddits are just filled with lies.

Any sub that is based on storytelling or reposting memes, videos etc. are karma farms and lies.

Most subs that are based on politics or current events are at best biased, at worst completely astroturf.

The only subs that I think still have mostly legit users are municipal subs (which still get targeted by bots when anything political comes up) and hobby subs where people show their works or discuss things.

I sometimes envy the illiterate.

At least they cannot read this.

I wonder if they have run the analytics on how many users are doing that. I would love to see that number.

> only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.

If the 800MAU still holds, that's 800k people.

well now you can unlock an 18+ version for sexual role-play so i guess its the other way around

[flagged]

It's a growing market, although it might be because of shifting goal posts. I had a friend whose son was placed in French immersion (a language he doesn't speak at all). From what I was understanding, he was getting up and walking around in kindergarten and was labelled as mentally divergent; his teachers apparently suggested to his mother that he see a doctor.

(Strangely these "mental illnesses" and school problems went away after he switched to an English language school, must be a miracle)

I assume the loneliness epidemic is producing similar cases.

> I had a friend whose son was placed in French immersion (a language he doesn't speak at all).

In my entire french immersion Kindergarden class, there was a total of one child who already spoke French. I don't think the fact that he didn't speak the language is the concern.

In what sense is it "immersion" if there are only one or two French speakers in the room (the teacher and an assistant?)??

They control reddit and used to control twitter.

There is/was an interesting period where "normies" were joining twitter en-masse, and adopted many of the denizens ideas as normal widespread ideas. Kinda like going on a camping trip at "the lake" because you heard it's fun and not realizing that everyone else on the trip is part of a semi-deranged cult.

The outsized effect of this was journalists thinking these people on twitter were accurate representations of what society on the whole was thinking.

good observation. twitch has even more loons.

wasn't there a trend on twitter to have a bio/signature with a bunch of mental illness acronyms?

Those people need to be uploaded into the Matrix and the data servers sent far, deep into space.

That’s really going to upset the crazies.

Despite 4o being one of the worst models on the market, they loved it. Probably because it was the most insane and delusional. You could get it to talk about really fucked up shit. It would happily tell you that you are the messiah.

The reaction to its original removal on Instagram Reels, r/ChatGPT, etc., was genuinely so weird and creepy. I didn't realise before this how many people had genuine parasocial (?) relationships with these LLMs.

It was the first model I used that was half decent at coding. Everyone remembers their gateway drug.

I was mostly using 4o for academic searches and planning. It was the best model for me. Based on the context I was giving and questions I was asking, 4o was the most the consistent model.

It used to get things wrong for sure but it was predictable. Also I liked the tone like everyone else. I stopped using ChatGPT after they removed 4o. Recently, I have started using the newer GPT-5 models (got free one month). Better than before but not quite. Acts way over smart haha

I wonder if it will still be up on Azure? How much you think I can make if I setup 4o under a domain like yourgirlfriendis.ai or w/e

Note: I wouldnt actually, I find it terrible to prey on people.

ChatGPT Made Me Delusional: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRjgNgJms3Q

Should be essential watching for anyone that uses these things.

[dead]

Theo can sleep tonight.

I can't see o3 in my model selector as well?

RIP

Oh good. Not in the API. The 4o-mini is super cheap and useful for a bunch of things I do (evaluating post vector-search for relevancy).

I still don’t know how openAI thought it was a good idea to have a model named "4o" AND a model named "o4", unless the goal was intentional confusion

Even ChatGPT (and certainly Google) confuses the names.

I'm sure there is some internal/academic reason for them, but from an outside observer simply horrible.

Wasn't "ChatGPT" itself only supposed to be a research/academic name, until it unexpectedly broke containment and they ended up having to roll with it? The naming was cursed from the start.

How many times have you noticed people confusing the name itself: ChatGBT, ChatGTP etc.

We're the technical crowd cursed and blinded by knowledge.

When picking a fight with product marketing, just don't.

Considering how many people say ChatGTP too

I still don't like how French people don't call it "chat j'ai pété".

The other day I heard ChatGBD.

Have you heard Boris Johnson's version?

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/JAVMEs5CG1Y

I'm gonna watch this again about 5 times because it's so fucking funny

The comments have their own overdose of deliciousness. That click to look at them, never disappoints :-)

This one was great hahaha

MY favourite is ChatJippiddy

The Primeagen :).

Do you watch primagen by instance?

A fellow Primagen viewer spotted.

Or just "gippity" for short.

ChagGDP because a country worth of money was spent to train it.

GTP goes forward from the middle, teeth, then lips, as compared to GPT which goes middle, lips, teeth; you'll see this pattern happen with a lot of words in linguistic history

I’ve been hearing that consistently from a friend, I gave up on correcting them because “ChatGPT” just wouldn’t stick

It's almost always marketing and some stupid idea someone there had. I don't know why non-technical people try and claim so much ownership over versioning. You nearly always end up with these ridiculous outcomes.

"I know! Let's restart the version numbering for no good reason!" becomes DOOM (2016), Mortal Kombat 1 (2025), Battlefield 1 (2016), Xbox One (not to be confused with the original Xbox 1)

As another example, look at how much of a trainwreck USB 3 has become

Or how Nvidia restarted Geforce card numbering

Xbox should be in the hall of fame for terrible names.

There's also Xbox One X, which is not in the X series. Did I say that right? Playstation got the version numbers right. I couldn't make names as incomprehensible as Xbox if I tried.

Rumor has it they were jelly because the Playstation 3 had one higher version number than what would have been the Xbox 2, so it became the Xbox 360 instead. And then got further off the rails when its replacement arrived

"4o" was bad to begin with, as "four-oh" is a common verbalization of "4.0".

Even more than that, I've seen a lot of people confuse 4 and 4o, probably because 4o sounds like a shorthand for 4.0 which would be the same thing as 4.

Come to think of it, maybe they had a play on 4o being “40”, and o4-mini being “04”, and having to append the “mini” to bring home the message of 04<40

5.2 is back to being a sycophantic hallucinating mess for most use cases - I've anecdotally caught it out on many of the sessions I've had where it apologizes "You're absolutely right... that used to be the case but as of the latest version as you pointed out, it no longer is." when it never existed in the first place. It's just not good.

On the other hand - 5.0-nano has been great for fast (and cheap) quick requests and there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative today if they're sunsetting 5.0 models.

I really don't know how they're measuring improvements in the model since things seem to have been getting progressively worse with each release since 4o/o4 - Gemini and Opus still show the occasional hallucination or lack of grounding but both readily spend time fact-checking/searching before making an educated guess.

I've had chatgpt blatantly lie to me and say there are several community posts and reddit threads about an issue then after failing to find that, asked it where it found those and it flat out said "oh yeah it looks like those don't exist"

That’s been my experience and has lead to hours of wasted time. It’s faster for me to read through docs and watch YouTube.

Even if I submit the documentation or reference links they are completely ignored.

They will have to update the openai. Com footer I guess

Latest Advancements

GPT-5

OpenAI o3

OpenAI o4-mini

GPT-4o

GPT-4o mini

Sora

They should open source GPT-4o.

If people want an AI as a boyfriend at least they should use one that is open source.

If you disagree on something you can also train a lora.

I think this kind of thing is a pretty strong argument for the entire open source model ecosystem, not just open weights but open data and the whole gamut.

> with only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.

LOL WHAT?! I'm 0.1% of users? I'm certain part of the issue is it takes 3-clicks to switch to GPT-4o and it has to be done each time the page is loaded.

> that they preferred GPT‑4o’s conversational style and warmth.

Uh.. yeah maybe. But more importantly, GPT-4o gave better answers.

Zero acknowledgement about how terrible GPT-5 was when it was first released. It has since improved but it's not clear to me it's on-par with GPT-4o. Thinking mode is just too slow to be useful and so GPT-4o still seems better and faster.

Oh well, it'll be missed.

I agree - I use 4o via the API, simply because it answers so quickly. Its answers are usually pretty good on programming topics. I don't engage in chit-chat with AI models, so it's not really about the personality (which seems to be the main framing people are talking about), just the speed.