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I'm starting to be reminded of the razor blade business.
As a consumer, it is so exhausting keeping up with what model I should or can be using for the task I want to accomplish.
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I’m assuming when you say “read once”, that implies reading once every single release?

It’s confusing. If I’m confused, it’s confusing. This is UX 101.

Some people don't blindly trust the marketing department of the publisher
Then it doesn't even matter what they name the model since it's just marketing that they wouldn't trust anyway.
"good at advanced reasoning", "fast at advanced reasoning", "slower at advanced reasoning but more advanced than the good one but not as fast but cant search the internet", "great at code and logic", "good for everyday tasks but awful at everything else", "faster for most questions but answers them incorrectly", "can draw but cant search", "can search but cant draw", "good for writing and doing creative things"
Putting the actual list would have made it too clear that I'm right I see
Aside from anything else, having one model called o4 and one model called 4o is confusing. And I know they haven't released o4 yet but still.
We'll know they have cracked AGI when they solve the hardest problem of all - naming things
It's becoming a bit like iphone 3, 4... 13, 25...

Ok they are all phones that run apps and have a camera. I'm not an "AI power user", but I do talk to ChatGPT + Grok for daily tasks and use copilot.

The big step function happened when they could search the web but not much else has changed in my limited experience.

This is a very apt analogy.

It confers to the speaker confirmation they're absolutely right - names are arbitrary.

While also politely, implicitly, pointing out the core issue is it doesn't matter to you --- which is fine! --- but it may just be contributing to dull conversation to be the 10th person to say as much.

This one seems to make it easier — if the promises here hold true, the multi-modal support probably makes o4-mini-high OpenAI's best model for most tasks unless you have time and money, in which case it's o3-pro.
I think it can be confusing if you're just reading the news. If you use ChatGPT, the model selector has good brief explanations and teaching you about newly available options if you don't visit the dropdown. Anthropic does similarly.
I asked OpenAI how to choose the right USB cable for my device. Now the objects around me are shimmering and winking out of existence, one by one. Help
Lol. But that's nothing. Wait until you shimmer and wink in and out of existence, like llms do during each completion
As another consumer, I think you're overreacting, it's not that bad.
Gemini 2.5 Pro for every single task was the meta until this release. Will have to reassess now.
Huh. I use Gemini 2.0 Flash for many things because it's several times faster than 2.5 Pro.
Agreed.

I pretty much stopped shopping around once Gemini 2.0 Flash came out.

For general, cloud-centric software development help, it does the job just fine.

I'm honestly quite fond of this Gemini model. I feel silly saying that, but it's true.

Yes, this one is addictive for its speed and I like how Google was clever and also offered it in a powerful reasoning edition. This helps offset deficiencies from being smaller while still being cheap. I also find it quite sufficient for my kind of coding. I only pull out 2.5 Pro on larger and complex code bases that I think might need deeper domain specific knowledge beyond the coding itself.
how do you deal with the fact that they use all of your data for training their own systems and review all conversations
Personally, I frankly do not care for most things. But for more sensitive things which might land me in trouble, local models are the way to go.
Mad tangent, but as an old timey MtG player it’s always jarring when someone uses “the meta” not to refer to the particular dynamics of their competitive ecosystem but to a single strategy within it. Impoverishes the concept, I feel, even in this case where I don’t actually think a single model is best at everything.
I'm a World of Warcraft & Dota 2 player, using "the meta" in that way is pretty common in gaming these days I think. The "meta" is still the 'metagame' in the competitive ecosystem sense, but it also refers to strategies that are considered flavor of the month (FOTM) or just generally safe bets.

So there's "the meta", and there's "that strategy is meta", or "that strategy is the meta."

Yeah, I accept that "Nash equilibrium" isn't likely to catch on at this stage.
The answer is to just use the latest Claude model and not worry beyond that.
It feels like all the AI companies are pulling the versions out of their arse at the moment, I think they should work backwards and work to AGI 1.0

So my guess currently is that most are lingering at about 0.3

Where's the comparison with Gemini 2.5 Pro?
For coding, I like the Aider polyglot benchmark, since it covers multiple programming languages.

Gemini 2.5 Pro got 72.9%

o3 high gets 81.3%, o4-mini high gets 68.9%

where do you find those o3 high numbers? https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ currently has gemini 2.5 pro as the leader at, as you say, 72.9%.
It's in the OpenAI article post (OP) i.e. OpenAI ran Aider themselves.
Update: the leaderboard has o3 high + 4o tops of the charts now with 82.7%. This is a) amazing b) 20x more expensive than Gemini.
Isn't it easy to train on the specific Exercism exercises that this benchmark uses?
It was a good benchmark until it entered the training set.
Some sources mention that o3 scores 63.8 on SWE-bench, while Gemini 2.5 Pro scores 69.1.

On most other benchmarks, they seem to perform about the same, which is bad news for o3 because it's much more expensive and slower than Gemini 2.5 Pro, and it also hides its reasoning while Gemini shows everything.

We can probably just stick with Gemini 2.5 Pro, since it offers the best combination of price, quality, and speed. No need to worry about finding a replacement (for now).

> Some sources mention that o3 scores 63.8 on SWE-bench, while Gemini 2.5 Pro scores 69.1.

It's the opposite. o3 scores higher

The pace of notable releases across the industry right now is unlike any time I remember since I started doing this in the early 2000's. And it feels like it's accelerating
Not really. We’re definitely in the incremental improvement stage at this point. Certainly no indication that progress is “accelerating”.
ChatGPT 3 : iPhone 1

A bunch of models later, we're about on the iPhone 4-5 now. Feels about right.

It's more like GPT-3 is the Manchester Baby, and we're somewhere around IBM 700 series right now. Still a long way to go to iPhone, as much as the industry likes to pretend otherwise.
Both were big consumer commercial breakouts and far better than predecessors. And several years later both see only iterative improvements.

Neither apply to your analogy.

Integration is accelerating rapidly. Even if model development froze today, we would still probably have ~5 years of adoption and integration before it started to level off.
You are both correct. It feels like the tech itself is kinda plateauing but it's still massively under-used. It will take a decade or more before the deployment starts slowing down.
But we're seeing incremental improvements every two months, so...
Lots of releases but very little actual performance increases
Sonnet and Gemini saw fairly substantial perf increases recenly
Love Sonnet but 3.7 is not obviously an improvement over 3.5 in my real world usage. Gemini 2.5 pro is great, has replaced most others for me (Grok I use for things that require realtime answers)
Are you comparing it with or without thinking? I'd say it's a fairly big improvement in long thinking mode.
How is this a notable release? It's strictly worse than Gemini 2.5 on coding &c, and only an iterative improvement over their own models. The only thing that struck me as particularly interesting was the native visual reasoning.
It's not worse on coding. SWE Bench, Aider, live bench coding all show noticeably better results.
I’m not sure I fully understand the rationale of having newer mini versions (eg o3-mini, o4-mini) when previous thinking models (eg o1) and smart non-thinking models (eg gpt-4.1) exist. Does anyone here use these for anything?
I use o3-mini-high in Aider, where I want a model to employ reasoning but not put up with the latency of the non-mini o1.
o1 is a much larger, more expensive to operate on OpenAI's end. Having a smaller "newer" (roughly equating newer to more capable) model means that you can match the performance of larger older models while reducing inference and API costs.
If the ai is smart, why not have it choose the model for the user
That’s what GPT-5 was supposed to be (instead of a new base or reasoning model) last Sam updated his plans I thought. Did those change again?
Not sure what the goal is with Codex CLI. It's not running a local LLM right, just a CLI to make API calls from the terminal?
This might be their answer to claude code more than anything else.
Yes, that's exactly what I thought as well. An attempt to get more share in the developer tooling space for the long term.
Is there a non-obvious reason using something like Python to solve queries requiring calculations was not used from day one with LLMs?
Because it‘s not a feature of the LLM but the product that is built around it (like ChatGPT).
It's true that product provides the tools, but the model still needs to be trained to use tools, or it won't use them well or at the right times.
LLMs could not use tools on day one.
Are these available via the API? I'm getting back 'model_not_found' when testing.
What is wrong with OpenAI? The naming of their models seems like it is intentionally confusing - maybe to distract from lack of progress? Honestly, I have no idea which model to use for simply everyday tasks anymore.
Seems to me like they're somewhat trying to simplify now.

GPT-N.m -> Non-reasoning

oN -> Reasoning

oN+1-mini -> Reasoning but speedy; cut-down version of an upcoming oN model (unclear if true or marketing)

It would be nice if they actually stick to this pattern.

Are the oN models built on top of GPT-N.m models? It would be nice to know the lineage there.
I suspect that "ChatGPT-4o" is the most confusing part. Absolutely baffling to go with that and then later "oN", but surely they will avoid any "No" models moving forward
But we have both 4o and 4.1 for non-reasoning. And it's still not clear to me which is better (the comparison on their page was from an older version of 4o).
It really is bizarre. If you had asked me 2 days ago I would have said unequivically that these models already existed. Surely given the rate of change a date-based numbering system would be more helpful?
I tend to look at the lmarena leaderboard to see what to use (or the aider polyglot leaderboard for coding)
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Maybe they should ask the new models to generate a better name for themselves. It's getting quite confusing.
Surprisingly, they didn't provide a comparison to Sonnet 3.7 or Gemini Pro 2.5—probably because, while both are impressive, they're only slightly better by comparison.

Lets see what the pricing looks like.

They didn't provide a comparison either in the GPT-4.1 release and quite a few past releases, which is telling of their attitude as an org.
Looks like they are taking a page from Apple's book, which is to never even acknowledge other products exist outside your ecosystem.
Apple has commercials for a decade making fun of “PCs”
It's pretty frustrating to see a press release with "Try on ChatGPT" and then not see the models available even though I'm paying them $200/mo.
I see o4-mini on the $20 tier but no o3.
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They're supposed to be released today for everyone, and o3-pro for Pro users in a few weeks:

"ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users will see o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high in the model selector starting today, replacing o1, o3‑mini, and o3‑mini‑high."

with rate limits unchanged

They are all now available on the Pro plan. Y'all really ought to have a little bit more grace to wait 30 minutes after the announcement for the rollout.
Or maybe OpenAI could wait until they'd released it before telling people to use it now.
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They'd probably want their announcement to be the one the press picks up instead of a tweet or reddit post saying "Did anyone else notice the new ChatGPT model?"
Deploying several things is sometimes tricky and this could not be a smaller deal.
Why pay $200/mo when you can just access the models from the Platform playground?
Higher limits and operator access maybe?
OpenAI be like:

    o1, o1-mini,
    o1-pro, o3,
    o4-mini, gpt-4,
    gpt-4o, gpt-4-turbo,
    gpt-4.5, gpt-4.1,
    gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4.1-mini,
    gpt-4.1-nano, gpt-3.5-turbo
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Underwhelming. Cancelled my subscription in favor of Gemini Pro 2.5
Very impressive! But under arguably the most important benchmark -- SWE-bench verified for real-world coding tasks -- Claude 3.7 still remains the champion.[1]

Incredible how resilient Claude models have been for best-in-coding class.

[1] But by only about 1%, and inclusive of Claude's "custom scaffold" augmentation (which in practice I assume almost no one uses?). The new OpenAI models might still be effectively best in class now (or likely beating Claude with similar augmentation?).

Claude got 63.2% according to the swebench.com leaderboard (listed as "Tools + Claude 3.7 Sonnet (2025-02-24)).[0] OpenAI said they got 69.1% in their blog post.

[0] swebench.com/#verified

OpenAI have not shown themselves to be trustworthy, I'd take their claims with a few solar masses of salt
Yes, however Claude advertised 70.3%[1] on SWE bench verified when using the following scaffolding:

> For Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new), we use a much simpler approach with minimal scaffolding, where the model decides which commands to run and files to edit in a single session. Our main “no extended thinking” pass@1 result simply equips the model with the two tools described here—a bash tool, and a file editing tool that operates via string replacements—as well as the “planning tool” mentioned above in our TAU-bench results.

Arguably this shouldn't be counted though?

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww-...

I think you may have misread the footnote. That simpler setup results in the 62.3%/63.7% score. The 70.3% score results from a high-compute parallel setup with rejection sampling and ranking:

> For our “high compute” number we adopt additional complexity and parallel test-time compute as follows:

> We sample multiple parallel attempts with the scaffold above

> We discard patches that break the visible regression tests in the repository, similar to the rejection sampling approach adopted by Agentless; note no hidden test information is used.

> We then rank the remaining attempts with a scoring model similar to our results on GPQA and AIME described in our research post and choose the best one for the submission.

> This results in a score of 70.3% on the subset of n=489 verified tasks which work on our infrastructure. Without this scaffold, Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieves 63.7% on SWE-bench Verified using this same subset.

Somehow completely missed that, thanks!

I think reading this makes it even clearer that the 70.3% score should just be discarded from the benchmarks. "I got a 7%-8% higher SWE benchmark score by doing a bunch of extra work and sampling a ton of answers" is not something a typical user is going to have already set up when logging onto Claude and asking it a SWE style question.

Personally, it seems like an illegitimate way to juice the numbers to me (though Claude was transparent with what they did so it's all good, and it's not uninteresting to know you can boost your score by 8% with the right tooling).

Gemini 2.5 Pro is widely considered superior to 3.7 Sonnet now by heavy users, but they don't have an SWE-bench score. Shows that looking at one such benchmark isn't very telling. Main advantage over Sonnet being that it's better at using a large amount of context, which is enormously helpful during coding tasks.

Sonnet is still an incredibly impressive model as it held the crown for 6 months, which may as well be a decade with the current pace of LLM improvement.

Main advantage over Sonnet is Gemini 2.5 doesn't try to make a bunch of unrelated changes like it's rewriting my project from scratch.
I find Gemini 2.5 truly remarkable and overall better than Claude, which I was a big fan of
Still doesn't work well in Cursor unfortunately.
Works well in RA.Aid --in fact I'd recommend it as the default model in terms of overall cost and capability.
Working fine here. What problems do you see?
Not the OP but believe they could be referring to the fact it’s not supported in edit mode yet, only agent mode.

So far for me that’s not been too much of a roadblock. Though I still find overall Gemini struggles with more obscure issues such as SQL errors in dbt

Cline/Roo Code work fine with it
Also that Gemini 2.5 still doesn’t support prompt caching, which is huge for tools like Cline.
Oh, that must’ve been in the last few days. Weird that it’s only in 2.5 Pro preview but at least they’re headed in the right direction.

Now they just need a decent usage dashboard that doesn’t take a day to populate or require additional GCP monitoring services to break out the model usage.

It's viable context, context length where is doesn't fall apart, is also much longer.
I do find it likes to subtly reformat every single line thereby nuking my diff and making its changes unusable since I can’t verify them that way, which Sonnet doesn’t do.
This was incredibly irritating at first, though over time I've learned to appreciate this "extra credit" work. It can be fun to see what Claude thinks I can do better, or should add in addition to whatever feature I just asked for. Especially when it comes to UI work, Claude actually has some pretty cool ideas.

If I'm using Claude through Copilot where it's "free" I'll let it do its thing and just roll back to the last commit if it gets too ambitious. If I really want it to stay on track I'll explicitly tell it in the prompt to focus only on what I've asked, and that seems to work.

And just today, I found myself leaving a comment like this: //Note to Claude: Do not refactor the below. It's ugly, but it's supposed to be that way.

Never thought I'd see the day I was leaving comments for my AI agent coworker.

> If I'm using Claude through Copilot where it's "free"

Too bad Microsoft is widely limiting this -- have you seen their pricing changes?

I also feel like they nerfed their models, or reduced context window again.

Claude is almost comically good outside of copilot. When using through copilot it’s like working with a lobotomized idiot (that complains it generated public code about half the time).
It used to be good, or at least quite decent in GH Copilot, but it all turned into poop (the completions, the models, everything) ever since they announced the pricing changes.

Considering that M$ obviously trains over GitHub data, I'm a bit pissed, honestly, even if I get GH Copilot Pro for free.

What language / framework are you using? I ask because in a Node / Typescript / React project I experience the opposite- Claude 3.7 usually solves my query on the first try, and seems to understand the project's context, ie the file structure, packages, coding guidelines, tests, etc, while Gemini 2.5 seems to install packages willy-nilly, duplicate existing tests, create duplicate components, etc.
I feel that Claude 3.7 is smarter, but does way too much and has poor prompt adherence
2.5 Pro is very buggy with cursor. It often stops before generating any code. It's likely a cursor problem, but I use 3.7 because of that.
Eh, I wouldn't say that's accurate, I think it's situational. I code all day using AI tools and Sonnet 3.7 is still the king. Maybe it's language dependent or something, but all the engineers I know are full on Claude-Code at this point.
I keep seeing this sentiment so often here and on X that I have to wonder if I'm somehow using a different Gemini 2.5 Pro. I've been trying to use it for a couple of weeks already and without exaggeration it has yet to solve a single programming task successfully. It is constantly wrong, constantly misunderstands my requests, ignores constraints, ignores existing coding conventions, breaks my code and then tells me to fix it myself.
I haven't been following them that closely, but are people finding these benchmarks relevant? It seems like these companies could just tune their models to do well on particular benchmarks
That’s exactly what’s happening. I’m not convinced there’s any real progress occurring here.
The benchmark is something you can optimize for, doesn't mean it generalize well. Yesterday I tried for 2 hours to get claude to create a program that would extract data from a weird adobe file. 10$ later, the best I had is a program that was doing something like:

  switch(testFile) {
    case "test1.ase": // run this because it's a particular case 
    case "test2.ase": // run this because it's a particular case
    default:  // run something that's not working but that's ok because the previous case should
              // give the right output for all the test files ...
  }
Also, if you're using Cursor AI, it seems to have much better integration with Claude where it can reflect on its own things and go off and run commands. I don't see it doing that with Gemini or the O1 models.
The image generation improvement with o4-mini is incredible. Testing it out today, this is a step change in editing specificity even from the ChatGPT 4o LLM image integration just a few weeks ago (which was already a step change). I'm able to ask for surgical edits, and they are done correctly.

There isn't a numerical benchmark for this that people seem to be tracking but this opens up production-ready image use cases. This was worth a new release.

Thanks for sharing that. that was more interesting then their demo. I tried it and it was pretty good! I have felt that the ability to iterate from images blocked this from any real production use I had. This may be good enough now.

Example of edits (not quite surgical but good): https://chatgpt.com/share/68001b02-9b4c-8012-a339-73525b8246...

I don’t know if they let you share the actual images when sharing a chat. For me, they are blank.
wait, o4-mini outputs images? What I thought I saw was the ability to do a tool call to zoom in on an image.

Are you sure that's not 4o?

I’m generating logo designs for merch via o4-mini-high and they are pretty good. Good text and comprehending my instructions.
in the api or on the website?
It's using the new gpt-4o, a version that's not in the API
also another addition: i previously tried to upload an image for chatgpt to edit and it was incapable under the previous model i tried. Now its able to change uploaded images using o4mini.
I often wonder if we could expect that to reach 80% - 90% within next 5 years.
Finally, a new SOTA model on SWE-bench. Love to see this progress, and nice to see OpenAI finally catching up in the coding domain.

  ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users will see o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high in the model selector starting today, replacing o1, o3‑mini, and o3‑mini‑high.
I subscribe to pro but don't yet see the new models (either in the Android app or on the web version).
I wish companies would adhere to a consistent naming scheme, like <name>-<params>-<cut-off-month>.
Maybe OpenAI needs an easy mode for all these people saying 5 choices of models (and that's only if you pay) is simply too confusing for them.

They even provide a description in the UI of each before you select it, and it defaults to a model for you.

If you just want an answer of what you should use and can't be bothered to research them, just use o3(4)-mini and call it a day.

I personally like being able to choose because I understand the tradeoffs and want to choose the best one for what I’m asking. So I hope this doesn’t go away.

But I agree that they probably need some kind of basic mode to make things easier for the average person. The basic mode should decide automatically what model to use and hide this from the user.

Would that be considered a Mixture of Experts system?
No, Mixture of Experts is a really confusing term.

It sounds like it means "have a bunch of models, one that's an expert in physics, one that's an expert in health etc and then pick the one that's a best fit for the user's query".

It's not that. The "experts" are each another giant opaque blob of weights. The model is trained to select one of those blobs, but they don't have any form of human-understandable "expertise". It's an optimization that lets you avoid using ALL of the weights for every run through the model, which helps with performance.

https://huggingface.co/blog/moe#what-is-a-mixture-of-experts... is a decent explanation.

I thought sama said that that's the plan for gpt-5: a router which'll choose the right model and thinking level for you
o3 is cheaper than o1. (per 1M tokens)

• o3 Pricing:

  - Input: $10.00  

  - Cached Input: $2.50  

  - Output: $40.00
• o1 Pricing:

  - Input: $15.00  

  - Cached Input: $7.50  

  - Output: $60.00
o4-mini pricing remains the same as o3-mini.
4o and o4 at the same time. Excellent work on the product naming, whoever did that.
It took me reading your comment to realize that they were different and this wasn’t deja vu. Maybe that says more about me than OpenAI, but my gut agrees with you.
Just wait until they announce oA and A0.

They jokingly admitted that they’re bad at naming in the 4.1 reveal video, so they’re certainly aware of the problem. They’re probably hoping to make the model lineup clearer after some of the older models get retired, but the current mess was certainly entirely foreseeable.

Energy Intensive Exceptional Intelligence (Omni-domain), AKA E-I-E-I-O.
A suggestion for OpenAI to create more meaningful model names:

{Size}-{Quarter/Year}-{Speed/Accuracy}-{Specialty}

Where:

* Size is XS/S/M/L/XL/XXL to indicate overall capability level

* Quarter/Year like Q2-25

* Speed/Accuracy indicated as Fast/Balanced/Precise

* Optional specialty tag like Code/Vision/Science/etc

Example model names:

* L-Q2-25-Fast-Code (Large model from Q2 2025, optimized for speed, specializes in coding)

* M-Q4-24-Balanced (Medium model from Q4 2024, balanced speed/accuracy)

This is even more incomprehensible to users who don't understand what this naming scheme is supposed to mean. Right now, most power users are keeping track of all the models and know what they are like, so this naming wouldn't help them. Normal consumers don't really know the difference between the models, but this wouldn't help them either - all those letters and numbers aren't super inviting and friendly. They could try just having a linear slider for amount of intelligence and another one for speed.
I think they should name them after fictional characters. Bonus points if they're trademarked characters.

"You gotta try Mickey, it beats the crap out of Gandalf in coding."

Thank god we don’t usually let engineers name stuff in the west.

While this is entirely logical in theory this is how you get LG style naming like “THE ALL NEW LG-CFT563-X2”

I mean, it makes total sense, it tells you exactly the model, region, series and edition! Right??

What about using Marvel superhero names (with permission, of course)? The studio keeps giving us stronger and stronger examples...
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