All the examples of "warmer" generations show that OpenAI's definition of warmer is synonymous with sycophantic, which is a surprise given all the criticism against that particular aspect of ChatGPT.
I suspect this approach is a direct response to the backlash against removing 4o.
> which is a surprise given all the criticism against that particular aspect of ChatGPT
From whom?
History teaches that the vast majority of practically any demographic wants--from the masses to the elites--is personal sycophancy. It's been a well-trodden path to ruin for leaders for millenia. Now we get species-wide selection against this inbuilt impulse.
> All the examples of "warmer" generations show that OpenAI's definition of warmer is synonymous with sycophantic, which is a surprise given all the criticism against that particular aspect of ChatGPT.
Have you considered that “all that criticism” may come from a relatively homogenous, narrow slice of the market that is not representative of the overall market preference?
I suspect a lot of people who are from a very similar background to those making the criticism and likely share it fail to consider that, because the criticism follows their own preferences and viewing its frequency in the media that they consume as representaive of the market is validating.
EDIT: I want to emphasize that I also share the preference that is expressed in the criticisms being discussed, but I also know that my preferred tone for an AI chatbot would probably be viewed as brusque, condescending, and off-putting by most of the market.
I know it is a matter of preference, but I loved the most GPT-4.5. And before that, I was blow away by one of the Opus models (I think it was 3).
Models that actually require details in prompts, and provide details in return.
"Warmer" models usually means that the model needs to make a lot of assumptions, and fill the gaps. It might work better for typical tasks that needs correction (e.g. the under makes a typo and it the model assumes it is a typo, and follows). Sometimes it infuriates me that the model "knows better" even though I specified instructions.
Here on the Hacker News we might be biased against shallow-yet-nice.
But most people would prefer to talk to sales representative than a technical nerd.
But the fact the last few iterations have all been about flair, it seems we are witnessing the regression of OpenAI into the typical fiefdom of product owners.
Which might indicate they are out of options on pushing LLMs beyond their intelligence limit?
I'm sure it is. That said, they've also increased its steering responsiveness -- mine includes lots about not sucking up, so some testing is probably needed.
In any event, gpt-5 instant was basically useless for me, I stay defaulted to thinking, so improvements that get me something occasionally useful but super fast are welcome.
I'm starting to get this feeling that there's no way to satisfy everyone. Some people hate the sycophantic models, some love them. So whatever they do, there's a large group of people complaining.
Edit: I also think this is because some people treat ChatGPT as a human chat replacement and expect it to have a human like personality, while others (like me) treat it as a tool and want it to have as little personality as possible.
>I'm starting to get this feeling that there's no way to satisfy everyone. Some people hate the sycophantic models, some love them. So whatever they do, there's a large group of people complaining.
Duh?
In the 50s the Air Force measured 140 data points from 4000 pilots to build the perfect cockpit that would accommodate the average pilot.
The result fit almost no one. Everyone has outliers of some sort.
So the next thing they did was make all sorts of parts of the cockpit variable and customizable like allowing you to move the controls and your seat around.
That worked great.
"Average" doesn't exist. "Average" does not meet most people's needs
Configurable does. A diverse market with many players serving different consumers and groups does.
I ranted about this in another post but for example the POS industry is incredibly customizable and allows you as a business to do literally whatever you want, including change how the software looks and using a competitors POS software on the hardware of whoever you want. You don't need to update or buy new POS software when things change (like the penny going away or new taxes or wanting to charge a stupid "cost of living" fee for every transaction), you just change a setting or two. It meets a variety of needs, not "the average businesses" needs.
N.B I am unable to find a real source for the Air force story. It's reported tons but maybe it's just a rumor.
The main change in 5 (and the reason for disabling other models) was to allow themselves to dynamically switch modes and models on the backend to minimize cost. Looks like this is a further tweak to revive the obsequious tone (which turned out to be crucial to the addicted portion of their user base) while still doing the dynamic processing.
> You’re rattled, so your brain is doing that thing where it catastrophizes a tiny mishap into a character flaw. But honestly? People barely register this stuff.
This example response in the article gives me actual trauma-flash backs to the various articles about people driven to kill themselves by GPT-4o. Its the exact same sentence structure.
Their decisions are based on data and so sycophantic must be what people want. That is the cold, hard reality.
When I look at modern culture: more likes and subscribes, money solves all problems, being physically attractive is more important than personality, genocide for real-estate goes unchecked (apart from the angry tweets), freedom of speech is a political football. Are you really surprised?
I can think of no harsher indictment of our times.
Interesting that they're releasing separate gpt-5.1-instant and gpt-5.1-thinking models. The previous gpt-5 release made of point of simplifying things by letting the model choose if it was going to use thinking tokens or not. Seems like they reversed course on that?
> We’re bringing both GPT‑5.1 Instant and GPT‑5.1 Thinking to the API later this week. GPT‑5.1 Instant will be added as gpt-5.1-chat-latest, and GPT‑5.1 Thinking will be released as GPT‑5.1 in the API, both with adaptive reasoning.
What we really desperately need is more context pruning from these LLMs. The ability to pull irrelevant parts of the context window as a task is brought into focus.
I cannot abide any LLM that tries to be friendly. Whenever I use an LLM to do something, I'm careful to include something like "no filler, no tone-matching, no emotional softening," etc. in the system prompt.
I don't want a more conversational GPT. I want the _exact_ opposite. I want a tool with the upper limit of "conversation" being something like LCARS from Star Trek. This is quite disappointing as a current ChatGPT subscriber.
Exactly, and it does't help with agentic use cases that tend to solve problem in on-shot, for example, there is 0 requirement from a model to be conversational when it is trying to triage a support question to preset categories.
Since Claude and OpenAI made it clear they will be retaining all of my prompts, I have mostly stopped using them. I should probably cancel my MAX subscriptions.
Instead I'm running big open source models and they are good enough for ~90% of tasks.
The main exceptions are Deep Research (though I swear it was better when I could choose o3) and tougher coding tasks (sonnet 4.5)
I'm excited to see whether the instruction following improvements play out in the use of Codex.
The biggest issue I'e seen _by far_ with using GPT models for coding has been their inability to follow instructions... and also their tendency to duplicate-act on messages from up-thread instead of acting on what you just asked for.
Unfortunately no word on "Thinking Mini" getting fixed.
Before GPT-5 was released it used to be a perfect compromise between a "dumb" non-Thinking model and a SLOW Thinking model. However, something went badly wrong within the GPT-5 release cycle, and today it is exactly the same speed (or SLOWER) than their Thinking model even with Extended Thinking enabled, making it completely pointless.
In essence Thinking Mini exists because it is faster than Thinking, but smarter than non-Thinking, but it is dumber than full-Thinking while not being faster.
5.1 Instant is clearly aimed at the people using it for emotional advice etc, but I'm excited about the adaptive reasoning stuff - thinking models are great when you need them, but they take ages to respond sometimes.
What's remarkable to me is how deep OpenAI is going on "ChatGPT as communication partner / chatbot", as opposed to Anthropic's approach of "Claude as the best coding tool / professional AI for spreadsheets, etc.".
I know this is marketing at play and OpenAI has plenty of resources developed to advancing their frontier models, but it's starting to really come into view that OpenAI wants to replace Google and be the default app / page for everyone on earth to talk to.
I think OpenAI and all the other chat LLMs are going to face a constant battle to match personality with general zeitgeist and as the user base expands the signal they get is increasingly distorted to a blah median personality.
It's a form of enshittification perhaps. I personally prefer some of the GPT-5 responses compared to GPT-5.1. But I can see how many people prefer the "warmth" and cloying nature of a few of the responses.
In some sense personality is actually a UX differentiator. This is one way to differentiate if you're a start-up. Though of course OpenAI and the rest will offer several dials to tune the personality.
FYI ChatGPT has a “custom instructions” setting in the personalization setting where you can ask it to lay off the idiotic insincere flattery. I recently added this:
> Do not compliment me for asking a smart or insightful question. Directly give the answer.
And I’ve not been annoyed since. I bet that whatever crap they layer on in 5.1 is undone as easily.
175 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadI suspect this approach is a direct response to the backlash against removing 4o.
From whom?
History teaches that the vast majority of practically any demographic wants--from the masses to the elites--is personal sycophancy. It's been a well-trodden path to ruin for leaders for millenia. Now we get species-wide selection against this inbuilt impulse.
Have you considered that “all that criticism” may come from a relatively homogenous, narrow slice of the market that is not representative of the overall market preference?
I suspect a lot of people who are from a very similar background to those making the criticism and likely share it fail to consider that, because the criticism follows their own preferences and viewing its frequency in the media that they consume as representaive of the market is validating.
EDIT: I want to emphasize that I also share the preference that is expressed in the criticisms being discussed, but I also know that my preferred tone for an AI chatbot would probably be viewed as brusque, condescending, and off-putting by most of the market.
Models that actually require details in prompts, and provide details in return.
"Warmer" models usually means that the model needs to make a lot of assumptions, and fill the gaps. It might work better for typical tasks that needs correction (e.g. the under makes a typo and it the model assumes it is a typo, and follows). Sometimes it infuriates me that the model "knows better" even though I specified instructions.
Here on the Hacker News we might be biased against shallow-yet-nice. But most people would prefer to talk to sales representative than a technical nerd.
But the fact the last few iterations have all been about flair, it seems we are witnessing the regression of OpenAI into the typical fiefdom of product owners.
Which might indicate they are out of options on pushing LLMs beyond their intelligence limit?
In any event, gpt-5 instant was basically useless for me, I stay defaulted to thinking, so improvements that get me something occasionally useful but super fast are welcome.
Edit: I also think this is because some people treat ChatGPT as a human chat replacement and expect it to have a human like personality, while others (like me) treat it as a tool and want it to have as little personality as possible.
Duh?
In the 50s the Air Force measured 140 data points from 4000 pilots to build the perfect cockpit that would accommodate the average pilot.
The result fit almost no one. Everyone has outliers of some sort.
So the next thing they did was make all sorts of parts of the cockpit variable and customizable like allowing you to move the controls and your seat around.
That worked great.
"Average" doesn't exist. "Average" does not meet most people's needs
Configurable does. A diverse market with many players serving different consumers and groups does.
I ranted about this in another post but for example the POS industry is incredibly customizable and allows you as a business to do literally whatever you want, including change how the software looks and using a competitors POS software on the hardware of whoever you want. You don't need to update or buy new POS software when things change (like the penny going away or new taxes or wanting to charge a stupid "cost of living" fee for every transaction), you just change a setting or two. It meets a variety of needs, not "the average businesses" needs.
N.B I am unable to find a real source for the Air force story. It's reported tons but maybe it's just a rumor.
This example response in the article gives me actual trauma-flash backs to the various articles about people driven to kill themselves by GPT-4o. Its the exact same sentence structure.
GPT-5.1 is going to kill more people.
When I look at modern culture: more likes and subscribes, money solves all problems, being physically attractive is more important than personality, genocide for real-estate goes unchecked (apart from the angry tweets), freedom of speech is a political football. Are you really surprised?
I can think of no harsher indictment of our times.
I cannot abide any LLM that tries to be friendly. Whenever I use an LLM to do something, I'm careful to include something like "no filler, no tone-matching, no emotional softening," etc. in the system prompt.
Instead I'm running big open source models and they are good enough for ~90% of tasks.
The main exceptions are Deep Research (though I swear it was better when I could choose o3) and tougher coding tasks (sonnet 4.5)
The biggest issue I'e seen _by far_ with using GPT models for coding has been their inability to follow instructions... and also their tendency to duplicate-act on messages from up-thread instead of acting on what you just asked for.
Before GPT-5 was released it used to be a perfect compromise between a "dumb" non-Thinking model and a SLOW Thinking model. However, something went badly wrong within the GPT-5 release cycle, and today it is exactly the same speed (or SLOWER) than their Thinking model even with Extended Thinking enabled, making it completely pointless.
In essence Thinking Mini exists because it is faster than Thinking, but smarter than non-Thinking, but it is dumber than full-Thinking while not being faster.
My main concern is that they're re-tuning it now to make it even MORE sycophantic, because 4o taught them that it's great for user retention.
I know this is marketing at play and OpenAI has plenty of resources developed to advancing their frontier models, but it's starting to really come into view that OpenAI wants to replace Google and be the default app / page for everyone on earth to talk to.
It's a form of enshittification perhaps. I personally prefer some of the GPT-5 responses compared to GPT-5.1. But I can see how many people prefer the "warmth" and cloying nature of a few of the responses.
In some sense personality is actually a UX differentiator. This is one way to differentiate if you're a start-up. Though of course OpenAI and the rest will offer several dials to tune the personality.
> Do not compliment me for asking a smart or insightful question. Directly give the answer.
And I’ve not been annoyed since. I bet that whatever crap they layer on in 5.1 is undone as easily.
Anyone?
(Update - they fixed it! perhaps I'm designing ChatGPT now?!)