RIP
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.
Note: I wouldnt actually, I find it terrible to prey on people.
Should be essential watching for anyone that uses these things.
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
You can go to chatgpt.com and ask "what model are you" (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.)
(I'm particularly annoyed by this UI choice because I always have to switch back to 5.1)
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.
A fellow Primagen viewer spotted.
I'm sure there is some internal/academic reason for them, but from an outside observer simply horrible.
We're the technical crowd cursed and blinded by knowledge.
"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
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.
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
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.
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.
Insane spin you're putting on it. At best, you're a cog in one of the worst recent evolutions of capitalism.
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.
By demonising them, you are making ads sounds way more glamorous than they are.
No it's not
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.
You’re not imagining it, and honestly? You're not broken for feeling this—its perfectly natural as a human to have this sentiment.
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.
If anyone is wondering, the setting for this is called Personalisation in user settings.
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.
(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.)
Its just as good as ever /s
interesting
I’m guessing age is needed to serve certain ads and the like, but what’s the value for customers?
> 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
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.)
Believe me, the Mac deserved it.
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).
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.
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.
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 where the danger may lie.
Alien 2: "AI generated porn"
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.
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
Latest Advancements
GPT-5
OpenAI o3
OpenAI o4-mini
GPT-4o
GPT-4o mini
Sora
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"
Even if I submit the documentation or reference links they are completely ignored.
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
__loam•2h ago
cactusplant7374•2h ago
NitpickLawyer•1h ago
If the 800MAU still holds, that's 800k people.
simonw•1h ago
bananaflag•1h ago
pxc•1h ago
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.
nomel•1h ago
Any numbers/reference behind this?
ChatGPT has ~300 million active users a day. A 0.02% (delusion disorder prevalence) would be 60k people.
bananaflag•1h ago
nomel•1h ago
Again, do you have anything behind this "highly prevalent phenomenon" claim?
pxc•1h ago
unethical_ban•1h ago
chasd00•39m ago
hamdingers•12m ago
Their hobby is... weird, but they're not stupid.
ragazzina•1h ago
Spend a day on Reddit and you'll quickly realize many subreddits are just filled with lies.
unethical_ban•1h ago
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.
moomoo11•1h ago
leumon•1h ago