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Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT

134 points5 hoursopenai.com
leumon4 hours ago

> 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-...

interesting

GoatInGrey3 hours ago

Pornographic use has long been the "break glass in case of emergency" for the LLM labs when it comes to finances.

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.

estimator72923 hours ago

While this is a valid take, I feel compelled to point out Chuck Tingle.

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.

MBCook2 hours ago

That’s all simple one way consumption though. I suspect the effect on people is very different when it’s interactive in the way an LLM can be that we’ve never had to recon with before.

That’s where the danger may lie.

+1
viraptor2 hours ago
pixl972 hours ago

Alien 1: "How did the earthlings lose control of their own planet?"

Alien 2: "AI generated porn"

cal_dent2 hours ago

i've always wondered how much the increasing prevalence of smut & not so niche romance novels, that have proliferated since e-readers became mainstream, have had on Gen Z and younger's sometimes unrealistic view/expectations of relationship. A lot of time is spent on porn sites etc. but not so much on how mainstream some of these novels have become

cluckindan2 hours ago

They had similar wonderings in the Victorian era, and probably in the Roman empire and ancient Greece too.

bakugo1 hour ago

> 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.

It's important to note that the vast majority of such books are written for a female audience, though.

measurablefunc2 hours ago

People are already addicted to non-interactive pornography so this is going to be even worse.

torginus2 hours ago

My personal take is that there has been no progress - potentially there has been a regression on all LLM things outside of coding a scientific pursuits - I used to have great fun with LLMs with creative writing stuff, but I feel like current models are stiff and not very good prose writers.

This is also true for stuff like writing clear but concise docs, they're overly verbose while often not getting the point across.

thayne3 hours ago

It says what to do if you are over 18, but thinks you are under 18. But what if it identifies someone under 18 as being older?

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.

novemp2 hours ago

> And what if you are over 18, but don't want to be exposed to that "adult" content?

Don't prompt it.

geeunits2 hours ago

This is for advertising purposes, not porn. They might feign that's the reason, but it's to allow alcohol & pharma to advertise, no doubt.

chilmers3 hours ago

Sexual and intimate chat with LLMs will be a huge market for whoever corners it. They'd be crazy to leave that money on the table.

palmotea3 hours ago

That's why laws against drugs are so terrible, it forces law-abiding businesses to leave money on the table. Repeal the laws and I'm sure there will be tons of startups to profit off of drug addiction.

0xbadcafebee2 hours ago

No need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...

The majority of illegal drugs aren't addictive, and people are already addicted to the addictive ones. Drug laws are a "social issue" (Moral Majority-influenced), not intended to help people or prevent harm.

chilmers3 hours ago

There are many companies making money off alcohol addiction, video game addiction, porn addiction, food addiction, etc. Should we outlaw all these things? Should we regulate them and try to make them safe? If we can do that for them, can't we do it for AI sex chat?

+1
runarberg2 hours ago
noosphr2 hours ago

The Politician's syllogism in action:

That is terrible.

Se have to do something.

This is something.

We must do it.

It terms of harm current laws on drugs fail everyone but teetotaller who want everyone else to have a miserable life too.

georgemcbay3 hours ago

> Repeal the laws and I'm sure there will be tons of startups to profit off of drug addiction.

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).

LPisGood2 hours ago

Why do you think it will be increasingly bad? It seems to me like it’s already as bad as it’s capable of getting.

shmel2 hours ago

what about laws against porn? Oh, wait, no, that's a legitimate business.

thayne3 hours ago

If your goal is to make money, sure. If your goal is to make AI safe, not so much.

tpurves2 hours ago

It's not just chat. Remember image and video generation are on the table. There are already a huge category of adult video 'games' of this nature. I think they use combos of pre-rendered and dynamic content. But really not hard to imagine a near future that interactive and completely personalized AI porn in full 4kHDR or VR is constantly and near-instantly available. I have no idea the broader social implications of all that, but the tech itself feels inevitable and nearly here.

koakuma-chan3 hours ago

It will be an even bigger market when robotics are sufficiently advanced.

acetofenone2 hours ago

My main concern is when they'll start to allow 18+ deepfakes

ekianjo3 hours ago

That market is for local models right now.

kace913 hours ago

What’s the goal there? Sexting?

I’m guessing age is needed to serve certain ads and the like, but what’s the value for customers?

elevation3 hours ago

Even when you're making PG content, the general propriety limits of AI can hinder creative work.

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.)

estimator72923 hours ago

Just today I asked how to shut down a Mac with "maximal violence". I was looking for the equivalent of "systemctl shutdown -f -f" and it refused to help me do violence.

Believe me, the Mac deserved it.

shmel2 hours ago

It reminds me that story about a teenage learning Rust that got a refusal because he had asked about "unsafe" code =)

jandrese3 hours ago

If you don't think the potential market for AI sexbots is enormous you have not paid attention to humanity.

robotnikman3 hours ago

There is a subreddit called /r/myboyfriendisAI, you can look through it and see for yourself.

jacquesm3 hours ago

Porn has driven just about every bit of progress on the internet, I don't see why AI would be the exception to that rule.

runarberg2 hours ago

This seems like a believable lie, until you think about it for 2 seconds.

No. Porn has not driven even a fraction of the progress on the progress on the internet. Not even close to one.

+2
jacquesm2 hours ago
leumon3 hours ago

according to the age-prediction page, the changes are:

> 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

ekianjo3 hours ago

There is a huge book market for sexual stories, in case you were not aware.

laweijfmvo55 minutes ago

imagine if every only fans creator suddenly paid a portion of their revenue to OpenAI for better messaging with their followers…

chasd003 hours ago

eh there's an old saying that goes "no Internet technology can be considered a success until it has been adopted by (or in this case integrated with) the porn industry".

NewsaHackO4 hours ago

>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

Scene_Cast24 hours ago

As someone who's worked with population data, I found that there is an enormous rift between reported opinion (and HN and reddit opinion) vs revealed (through experimentation) population preferences.

Macha3 hours ago

I always thought that the idea that "revealed preferences" are preferences, discounts that people often make decisions they would rather not. It's like the whole idea that if you're on a diet, it's easier to not have junk food in the house to begin with than to have junk food and not eat more than your target amount. Are you saying these people want to put on weight? Or is it just they've been put in a situation that defeats their impulse control?

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.

cal_dent2 hours ago

Perfectly put. Revealed preference simply assumes impulses are all correct, which is not the case, an exploits that.

Drugs make you feel great, in moderation perfectly acceptable, constantly not so much.

tunesmith2 hours ago

Well that's what akrasia is. It's not necessarily a contradiction that needs to be reconciled. It's fine to accept that people might want to behave differently than how they are behaving.

A lot of our industry is still based on the assumption that we should deliver to people what they demonstrate they want, rather than what they say they want.

make33 hours ago

Exactly, that sounds to me like a TikTok vs NPR/books thing, people tell everyone what they read, then go spend 11h watching TikToks until 2am.

toss14 hours ago

Sounds both true and interesting. Any particularly wild and/or illuminating examples of which you can share more detail?

jaggederest3 hours ago

My favorite somewhat off topic example of this is some qualitative research I was building the software for a long time ago.

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.

hnuser1234563 hours ago

The "my boyfriend is AI" subreddit.

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.

cm20124 hours ago

This is why I work in direct performance advertising. Our work reveals the truth!

make33 hours ago

Your work exploits people's addictive propensity and behaviours, and gives corporations incentives and tools to build on that.

Insane spin you're putting on it. At best, you're a cog in one of the worst recent evolutions of capitalism.

cm20123 hours ago

Exploitative ads are a small minority. I also think gambling advertising should be banned.

+4
marrone123 hours ago
22c2 hours ago

> its because people actually want AI to talk to them like that

I can't find the particular article (there's a few blogs and papers pointing out the phenomenon, I can't find the one I enjoyed) but it was along the lines of how in LLMArena a lot of users tend to pick the "confidently incorrect" model over the "boring sounding but correct" model.

The average user probably prefers the sycophantic echo chamber of confirmation bias offered by a lot of large language models.

I can't help but draw parallels to the "You are not immune to propaganda" memes. Turns out most of us are not immune to confirmation bias, either.

9x394 hours ago

I thought this was almost due to the AI personality splinter groups (trying to be charitable) like /myboyfriendisai and wrapper apps who vocally let them know they used those models the last time they sunset them.

cj3 hours ago

I was one of those pesky users who complained when o3 suddenly was unavailable.

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.

pdntspa3 hours ago

I thought it was based on the user thumbs-up and thumbs-down reactions, it evolving the way that it does makes it pretty obvious that users want their asses licked

josephg3 hours ago

They have added settings for this now - you can dial up and down how “warm” and “enthusiastic” you want the models to be. I haven’t done back to back tests to see how much this affects sycophancy, but adding the option as a user preference feels like the right choice.

If anyone is wondering, the setting for this is called Personalisation in user settings.

SeanAnderson3 hours ago

This doesn't come as too much of a surprise to me. Feels like it mirrors some of the reasons why toxic positivity occurs in the workplace.

cornonthecobra4 hours ago

Put on a good show, offer something novel, and people will gleefully march right off a cliff while admiring their shiny new purchase.

PlatoIsADisease3 hours ago

Your absolutely right. You’re not imagining it. Here is the quiet truth:

You’re not imagining it, and honestly? You're not broken for feeling this—its perfectly natural as a human to have this sentiment.

europeanNyan3 hours ago

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.

toxic723 hours ago

I REALLY struggle with Gemini 3 Pro refusing to perform web searches / getting combative with the current date. Ironically their flash model seems much more likely to opt for web search for info validation.

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

eru3 hours ago

Gemini refused to believe that I was using MacOS 26.

tgtweak3 hours ago

I find Gemini does the most searching (and the quickest... regularly pulls 70+ search results on a query in a matter of seconds - likely due to googlebot's cache of pretty much every page). Chatgpt seems to only search if you have it in thinking/research mode now.

sundarurfriend4 hours ago

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!

johnsmith184031 minutes ago

I left my chatgpt pro subscription when they removed the true deep thinkibg methods.

Mostly because how massively varied their releases are. Each one required big changes to how I use and work with it.

Claude is perfect in this sense all their models feel roughly the same just smarter so my workflow is always the same.

orphea3 hours ago

Have you had a chance to compare with Gemini 3?

sundarurfriend2 hours ago

Not extensively. The few interactions I've tried on it have been disappointing though. The Voice input is really bad, like significantly worse than any other major AI in the market. And I assumed search would be its strong suit and ran a search-and-compile type prompt (that I usually run on ChatGPT) on Gemini, and it was underwhelming at it. Not as bad as Grok (which was pretty much unusable for this), but noticeably worse than ChatGPT. Maybe Gemini has other strengths that I haven't come across yet, but on that one at least, it was

    ChatGPT 5 ~= Claude > ChatGPT 5.2 > Gemini >> Grok
PlatoIsADisease3 hours ago

nah bruh you are just imagining it.

Its just as good as ever /s

shmel2 hours ago

Retiring the most popular model for the relationship roleplay just one day before the Valentin's day is particularly ironic =) bravo, OpenAI!

jostmey4 hours ago

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.

azan_4 hours ago

It's amazing how different are the experiences different people have. To me every new version of chatgpt was an improvement and gemini is borderline unusable.

tgtweak3 hours ago

Very curious for what use cases you're finding gemini unusable.

azan_3 hours ago

Scientific research and proof-reading. Gemini is the laziest LLM I've used. Frequently he will lie that he searched for something and just make stuff up, basically never happens to me when I'm using gpt5.2.

+1
flexagoon3 hours ago
double0jimb03 hours ago

In my experience with Gemini, I find it incapable of not hallucinating.

farcitizen2 hours ago

I got the same experience. Dont get how people are saying gemini is so good.

0xbadcafebee1 hour ago

A lot of people still have a shallow understanding of how LLMs work. Each version of a model has different qualities than the last, each model is better or worse at some things than others, and each responds differently to different prompts, styles. Some smaller models perform better than larger ones. Sometimes you should use a system prompt, sometimes you shouldn't. Tuning settings for the model inference (temperature, top_p, penalties, etc) significantly influence the outcome. (https://www.promptingguide.ai/introduction/settings, https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/optimizing-llm-accur...)

Most "big name" models' interfaces don't let you change settings, or not easily. Power users learn to use different interfaces and look up guides to tweak models to get better results. You don't have to just shrug your shoulders and switch models. OpenAI's power interface: https://platform.openai.com/playground Anthropic's power interface: https://platform.claude.com/ For self-hosted/platform-agnostic, OpenWebUI is great: https://openwebui.com/

europeanNyan2 hours ago

Gemini has a great model, but it's a bad product. I feel much happier using ChatGPT because Gemini just seems so barebones and unpolished. It has this feeling of a tech demo.

amelius4 hours ago

Why not Claude?

esperent3 hours ago

The limits on the $20 plan are too low compared to Gemini and ChatGPT. They're too low to do any serious work at all.

jostmey4 hours ago

I personally find Claude the best at coding, but it’s usefulness doesn’t seem to extend to scientific research and writing

650REDHAIR3 hours ago

Because I’m sick of paying $20 for an hour of claude before it throttles me.

simonw4 hours ago

> [...] the vast majority of usage has shifted to GPT‑5.2, with only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.

fpgaminer4 hours ago

Well yeah, because 5.2 is the default and there's no way to change the default. So every time you open up a new chat you either use 5.2 or go out of your way to select something else.

(I'm particularly annoyed by this UI choice because I always have to switch back to 5.1)

arrowsmith4 hours ago

What about 5.1 do you prefer over 5.2?

fpgaminer3 hours ago

As far as I can tell 5.2 is the stronger model on paper, but it's been optimized to think less and do less web searches. I daily drive Thinking variants, not Auto or Instant, and usually want the _right_ answer even if it takes a minute. 5.1 does a very good job of defensively web searching, which avoids almost all of its hallucinations and keeps docs/APIs/UIs/etc up-to-date. 5.2 will instead often not think at all, even in Thinking mode. I've gotten several completely wrong, hallucinated answers since 5.2 came out, whereas maybe a handful from 5.1. (Even with me using 5.2 far less!)

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.

adamiscool84 hours ago

0.1% of users is not necessarily 0.1% of conversations…

SecretDreams4 hours ago

What's the default model when a random user goes to use the chatgpt website or app?

mrec4 hours ago

5.2 in the website. You can see what was used for a specific response by hovering over the refresh icon at the end.

bananaflag4 hours ago

5.2.

You can go to chatgpt.com and ask "what model are you" (it doesn't hallucinate on this).

SecretDreams4 hours ago

Probably a relationship between what's the default and what model is being used the most. It is more about what OAI sets than what users care about. Flip side is "good enough is good enough" for most users.

johndough4 hours ago

> (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.)

razodactyl3 hours ago

Confabulating* If you were hallucinating we would be more amused :)

AlexeyBrin4 hours ago

On the paid version it is 5.2.

lifetimerubyist4 hours ago

won't somebody think of the goonettes?!

deciduously3 hours ago

This was not a word I was prepared to learn about today.

Stratoscope1 hour ago

From the blog post (twice):

> creative ideation

At first I had no idea what this meant! So I asked my friend Miss Chatty [1] and we had an interesting conversation about it:

https://chatgpt.com/share/697bf761-990c-8012-9dd1-6ca1d5cc34...

[1] You may know her as ChatGPT, but I figure all the other AIs have fun human-sounding names, so she deserves one too.

zmmmmm1 hour ago

> In the API, there are no changes at this time

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.

9cb14c1ec017 minutes ago

Theo can sleep tonight.

femiagbabiaka4 hours ago

There will be a lot of mentally unwell people unhappy with this, but this is a huge net positive decision, thank goodness.

thedudeabides53 hours ago

will this nuke my old convos?

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

tom13374 hours ago

Would be cool if they'd release the weights for these models so users could now use them locally.

IhateAI3 hours ago

Why would someone want to spend half a million dollars on GPUs and components (if not more) to run one year old models that genuinely aren't useful? You can't self host trillion parameter models unless you own a datacenter lol (or want to just light money on fire).

tom13373 hours ago

Are the mini / omni models really trillion parameter models?

IhateAI3 hours ago

I don't think so, but you're still looking at a giant investment that can't really be justified for their capability.

WorldPeas4 hours ago

They'd only do that if they were some kind of open ai company /s

tgtweak3 hours ago

gpt-oss is pretty great tbh - one of the better all-around local models for knowledge and grounding.

amelius4 hours ago

lol :)

haunter4 hours ago

Which one is the AI boyfriend model? Tumblr, Twitter, and reddit will go crazy

goldenarm4 hours ago

4o is the most popular one for that

tibbydudeza4 hours ago

[flagged]

fpgaminer4 hours ago

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.

greatgib2 hours ago

I also terribly regret the retirement of 4.1. From my own personal usage, for code or normal tasks, I clearly noticed a huge gap in degraded performance between 4.1 and 5.1/5.2.

4.1 was the best so far. With straight to the point answers, and most of the time correct. Especially for code related questions. 5.1/5.2 on their side would a lot more easily hallucinate stupid responses or stupid code snippet totally not what was expected.

MillionOClock4 hours ago

My theory, based on what I would see with non-thinking models, is that as soon as you start detailing something too much (ie: not just "speak in the style of X" but more like "speak in the style of X with [a list of adjectives detailing the style of X]" they would loose creativity, would not fit the style very well anymore etc. I don't know how things have evolved with new training techniques etc. but I suspected that overthinking their tasks by detailing too much what they have to do can lower quality in some models for creative tasks.

perardi3 hours ago

Have you tried the relatively recent Personalities feature? I wonder if that makes a difference.

(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.)

perardi3 hours ago

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.

razodactyl3 hours ago

We're very echo-chambered here. That graph OpenAI released had coding at 4% or something.

siquick3 hours ago

2 weeks notice to migrate to a different style of model (“normal” 4.1-mini to reasoning 5.1) is bad form.

htrp3 hours ago

Sora + OpenAI voice Cloning + AdultGPT = Virtual Girlfriend/Boyfriend

(Upgrade for only 1999 per month)

MagicMoonlight4 hours ago

That’s really going to upset the crazies.

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.

patrickmcnamara4 hours ago

The reaction to its original removal on Instagram Reels, r/ChatGPT, etc., was genuinely so weird and creepy. I didn't realise before this how many people had genuine parasocial (?) relationships with these LLMs.

BeetleB4 hours ago

It was the first model I used that was half decent at coding. Everyone remembers their gateway drug.

pks0163 hours ago

I was mostly using 4o for academic searches and planning. It was the best model for me. Based on the context I was giving and questions I was asking, 4o was the most the consistent model.

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

giancarlostoro4 hours ago

I wonder if it will still be up on Azure? How much you think I can make if I setup 4o under a domain like yourgirlfriendis.ai or w/e

Note: I wouldnt actually, I find it terrible to prey on people.

lifetimerubyist4 hours ago

ChatGPT Made Me Delusional: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRjgNgJms3Q

Should be essential watching for anyone that uses these things.

inquirerGeneral4 hours ago

[dead]

ora-6004 hours ago

I can't see o3 in my model selector as well?

RIP

jedbrooke4 hours ago

I still don’t know how openAI thought it was a good idea to have a model named "4o" AND a model named "o4", unless the goal was intentional confusion

Someone12344 hours ago

Even ChatGPT (and certainly Google) confuses the names.

I'm sure there is some internal/academic reason for them, but from an outside observer simply horrible.

jsheard4 hours ago

Wasn't "ChatGPT" itself only supposed to be a research/academic name, until it unexpectedly broke containment and they ended up having to roll with it? The naming was cursed from the start.

razodactyl3 hours ago

How many times have you noticed people confusing the name itself: ChatGBT, ChatGTP etc.

We're the technical crowd cursed and blinded by knowledge.

nipponese4 hours ago

When picking a fight with product marketing, just don't.

afro884 hours ago

Considering how many people say ChatGTP too

throw-the-towel4 hours ago

I still don't like how French people don't call it "chat j'ai pété".

uh_uh4 hours ago

The other day I heard ChatGBD.

ben_w4 hours ago

Have you heard Boris Johnson's version?

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/JAVMEs5CG1Y

+1
lichenwarp4 hours ago
razodactyl3 hours ago

This one was great hahaha

tweakimp4 hours ago

MY favourite is ChatJippiddy

tibbydudeza4 hours ago

The Primeagen :).

Imustaskforhelp4 hours ago

Do you watch primagen by instance?

A fellow Primagen viewer spotted.

lifetimerubyist4 hours ago

Or just "gippity" for short.

bee_rider4 hours ago

ChagGDP because a country worth of money was spent to train it.

adzm4 hours ago

GTP goes forward from the middle, teeth, then lips, as compared to GPT which goes middle, lips, teeth; you'll see this pattern happen with a lot of words in linguistic history

Insanity4 hours ago

I’ve been hearing that consistently from a friend, I gave up on correcting them because “ChatGPT” just wouldn’t stick

pdntspa4 hours ago

It's almost always marketing and some stupid idea someone there had. I don't know why non-technical people try and claim so much ownership over versioning. You nearly always end up with these ridiculous outcomes.

"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

recursive4 hours ago

Xbox should be in the hall of fame for terrible names.

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.

recursive4 hours ago

"4o" was bad to begin with, as "four-oh" is a common verbalization of "4.0".

cryptoz4 hours ago

Even more than that, I've seen a lot of people confuse 4 and 4o, probably because 4o sounds like a shorthand for 4.0 which would be the same thing as 4.

mimischi4 hours ago

Come to think of it, maybe they had a play on 4o being “40”, and o4-mini being “04”, and having to append the “mini” to bring home the message of 04<40

__loam4 hours ago

Last time they tried to do this they got huge push back from the AI boyfriend people lol

simonw4 hours ago

/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ is a whole thing. It's not a joke subreddit.

pxc4 hours ago

The range of attitudes in there is interesting. There are a lot of people who take a fairly sensible "this is interactive fiction" kind of attitude, and there are others who bristle at any claim or reminder that these relationships are fictitious. There are even people with human partners who have "married" one or more AIs.

chasd003 hours ago

do you think they know they're just one context reset away from the llm not recognizing them at all and being treated like a stranger off the street? For someone mentally ill and somehow emotionally attached to the context it would be... jarring to say the least.

pxc20 minutes ago

Generally yes, they experience that routinely and complain and joke about it. Some of them do also describe such jarring experiences as making them cry for a long time.

If you can be respectful and act like a guest, it's worth reading a little there. You'll see the worrisome aspects in more detail but also a level of savvy that sometimes seems quite strange given the level of attachment. It's definitely interesting.

hamdingers2 hours ago

Many of them are very aware of how LLMs work, they regularly interact with context limits and there have been threads about thoughtfully pruning context vs letting the LLM compact, making backups, etc.

Their hobby is... weird, but they're not stupid.

unethical_ban3 hours ago

IIRC you'll get modded or banned for being critical of the use case. Which is their "right", but it's freaking weird.

bananaflag4 hours ago

And it's a pity that this highly prevalent phenomenon (to exaggerate a bit, probably the way tech in general will become the most influential in the next couple years) is barely mentioned on HN.

pxc4 hours ago

I dunno. Tbf that subreddit has a combination of

  - a large number of incredibly fragile users
  - extremely "protective" mods
  - a regular stream of drive-by posts that regulars there see as derogatory or insulting
  - a fair amount of internal diversity and disagreement
I think discussion on forums larger than it, like HN or popular subreddits, is likely to drive traffic that will ultimately fuel a backfiring effect for the members. It's inevitable, and it's already happening, but I'm not sure it needs to increase.

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.

__loam2 hours ago

Part of me thinks maybe I erred bringing this up, but there's discussions worth having in terms of continued access to software that's working for people regardless of what it is, and on if this is healthy. I'm probably on a live and let live on this but there's been cases of suicide and murder where chatbots were involved, and these people are potentially vulnerable to manipulation from the company.

nomel4 hours ago

> highly prevalent phenomenon

Any numbers/reference behind this?

ChatGPT has ~300 million active users a day. A 0.02% (delusion disorder prevalence) would be 60k people.

+1
bananaflag4 hours ago
ragazzina4 hours ago

>It's not a joke subreddit.

Spend a day on Reddit and you'll quickly realize many subreddits are just filled with lies.

unethical_ban3 hours ago

Any sub that is based on storytelling or reposting memes, videos etc. are karma farms and lies.

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.

cactusplant73744 hours ago

I wonder if they have run the analytics on how many users are doing that. I would love to see that number.

NitpickLawyer4 hours ago

> only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.

If the 800MAU still holds, that's 800k people.

leumon4 hours ago

well now you can unlock an 18+ version for sexual role-play so i guess its the other way around

michaelt4 hours ago

[flagged]

jbm4 hours ago

It's a growing market, although it might be because of shifting goal posts. I had a friend whose son was placed in French immersion (a language he doesn't speak at all). From what I was understanding, he was getting up and walking around in kindergarten and was labelled as mentally divergent; his teachers apparently suggested to his mother that he see a doctor.

(Strangely these "mental illnesses" and school problems went away after he switched to an English language school, must be a miracle)

I assume the loneliness epidemic is producing similar cases.

doormatt4 hours ago

> I had a friend whose son was placed in French immersion (a language he doesn't speak at all).

In my entire french immersion Kindergarden class, there was a total of one child who already spoke French. I don't think the fact that he didn't speak the language is the concern.

pxc4 hours ago

In what sense is it "immersion" if there are only one or two French speakers in the room (the teacher and an assistant?)??

WarmWash4 hours ago

They control reddit and used to control twitter.

There is/was an interesting period where "normies" were joining twitter en-masse, and adopted many of the denizens ideas as normal widespread ideas. Kinda like going on a camping trip at "the lake" because you heard it's fun and not realizing that everyone else on the trip is part of a semi-deranged cult.

The outsized effect of this was journalists thinking these people on twitter were accurate representations of what society on the whole was thinking.

greenchair4 hours ago

good observation. twitch has even more loons.

liveoneggs4 hours ago

wasn't there a trend on twitter to have a bio/signature with a bunch of mental illness acronyms?

moomoo114 hours ago

Those people need to be uploaded into the Matrix and the data servers sent far, deep into space.

tgtweak3 hours ago

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"

650REDHAIR3 hours ago

That’s been my experience and has lead to hours of wasted time. It’s faster for me to read through docs and watch YouTube.

Even if I submit the documentation or reference links they are completely ignored.

renewiltord3 hours ago

Oh good. Not in the API. The 4o-mini is super cheap and useful for a bunch of things I do (evaluating post vector-search for relevancy).

ClassAndBurn3 hours ago

They will have to update the openai. Com footer I guess

Latest Advancements

GPT-5

OpenAI o3

OpenAI o4-mini

GPT-4o

GPT-4o mini

Sora

jackblemming3 hours ago

They should open source GPT-4o.

GaggiX4 hours ago

If people want an AI as a boyfriend at least they should use one that is open source.

If you disagree on something you can also train a lora.

jaggederest4 hours ago

I think this kind of thing is a pretty strong argument for the entire open source model ecosystem, not just open weights but open data and the whole gamut.

waynesonfire53 minutes ago

> with only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.

LOL WHAT?! I'm 0.1% of users? I'm certain part of the issue is it takes 3-clicks to switch to GPT-4o and it has to be done each time the page is loaded.

> that they preferred GPT‑4o’s conversational style and warmth.

Uh.. yeah maybe. But more importantly, GPT-4o gave better answers.

Zero acknowledgement about how terrible GPT-5 was when it was first released. It has since improved but it's not clear to me it's on-par with GPT-4o. Thinking mode is just too slow to be useful and so GPT-4o still seems better and faster.

Oh well, it'll be missed.