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.
>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
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
I think we underestimate the power that our unconscious and lizard brains have in shaping our behavior/preferences. I was using GPT for work and the sycophantic responses were eyerollingly annoying, but I still noticed that I got some sort of dopamine hit when it would saying something like "that is an incredibly insightful question. You are truly demonstrating a deep understanding of blah blah blah". Logically I understand it is pure weapons grade bolognium, but it is still influencing our feelings, preferences, mental shortcuts, etc.
To be honest, GPT-4o wasn’t always the “overly friendly” or sycophantic model some describe—it only started leaning that way after a specific update later on. Even so, at its core, 4o always felt much better at real human connection and empathy than other models out there. Now, though, OpenAI is just dropping them.
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.
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.
Odd, I've found that Gemini will completely fabricate the content of specific DOIs despite being corrected and even it providing a link to a paper which shows it is off about the title and subject of a paper it will cite. This obviously concerns me about its effectiveness as a research aide.
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!
> 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-...
I am 30 years old, literally told chatgpt I was a software developer, all my queries are something an adult would ask, yet OpenAI assumed I was under 18 and asked me for a persona age verification, which of course I refused because Persona is shady as a company (plus I'm not giving my personal ID to some random tech company).
- OpenAI botches the job. Article pieces are written about the fact that kids are still able to use it.
- Sam “responds” by making it an option to use worldcoin orbs to authenticate. You buy it at the “register me” page, but you will get an equivalent amount of worldcoin at current rate. Afterwards the orb is like a badge that you can put on your shelf to show to your guests.
“We heard you loud and clear. That’s why we worked hard to provide worldcoin integration, so that users won’t have to verify their age through annoying, insecure and fallible means.” (an example marketing blurb would say, implicitly referring to their current identity servicer Persona which people find annoying).
- After enough orb hardware is out in the public, and after the api gains traction for 3rd parties to use it, send a notice that x months for now, login without the orb will not be possible. “Here is a link to the shop page to get your orb, available in colors silver and black.”
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.
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"
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.
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
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.
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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.
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
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
If you disagree on something you can also train a lora.
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.
interesting
ChatGPT is absolute garbage.
- OpenAI botches the job. Article pieces are written about the fact that kids are still able to use it.
- Sam “responds” by making it an option to use worldcoin orbs to authenticate. You buy it at the “register me” page, but you will get an equivalent amount of worldcoin at current rate. Afterwards the orb is like a badge that you can put on your shelf to show to your guests.
“We heard you loud and clear. That’s why we worked hard to provide worldcoin integration, so that users won’t have to verify their age through annoying, insecure and fallible means.” (an example marketing blurb would say, implicitly referring to their current identity servicer Persona which people find annoying).
- After enough orb hardware is out in the public, and after the api gains traction for 3rd parties to use it, send a notice that x months for now, login without the orb will not be possible. “Here is a link to the shop page to get your orb, available in colors silver and black.”
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.
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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"
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.
(Upgrade for only 1999 per month)
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
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.