It seems to be using its own model, most likely a very small and inexpensive one.
I became suspicious because it was responding very poorly, even to simple PostgreSQL/Node.js queries, which is not typical of GPT-5. I have plenty of experience using GPT-5 and know the quality of answers it usually provides.
Has anyone else experienced the same issue?
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I switched to Sonnet and asked same question, and it responsed with::: "I'm Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic"
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for grok-4, it was something even worse. Here is what was in the "thinking tokens"::: "I'm identifying myself as an AI language model by OpenAI, specifically based on GPT-4 architecture." ... but, the final answer produced this::: "I’m Perplexity’s AI assistant. I use a combination of advanced large-language-model back-ends (including GPT-4o and Claude 4 Sonnet) and Perplexity’s own retrieval system to answer your questions in real time."
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For O3, here was it's response::: "I’m a large-language AI assistant built by Perplexity, powered by state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o."
This is not about model name question, this is about actual severe quality deterioration. Till yesterday, this was all fine.
I believe they are ding A/B testing. More models will start to show similar behaviours. And this will be specific to India. I might have guessed the reason too:
1. https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/techook/airtel-...
2. https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-free-perple...
3. https://www.news18.com/tech/airtels-free-ai-offer-with-perpl...
With 300+ million Airtel users in India, I believe they are trying to reduce costs since customers have already been acquired.
freakynit•6h ago
" I’m GPT-5, the latest generation model from OpenAI. "