Google also announce conversational improvements to Gemini today:
https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-live-audio-update...
Amazing reconnaissance/marketing that they were able to overshadow OpenAI's announcement.
GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
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Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. I want to be conversational with my computer, I don't want it to respond in a manner that's trying to continue the conversation. Q: "Hey Computer, make me a cup of tea" A: "Ok. Making tea." Not: Q: "Hey computer, make me a cup of tea" A: "Oh wow, what a fantastic idea, I love tea don't you? I'll get right on that cup of tea for you. Do you want me to tell you about all the different ways you can make and enjoy…
I'm generally ok with it wanting a conversation, but yes, I absolutely hate it that is seems to always finish with a question even when it makes zero sense.
Sadly Grok also started doing that recently. Previously it was much more to the point but now got extremely wordy. The question in the end is a key giveaway that something under the hood has changed when the version number hasn’t
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#243I’ll pass. Altman and co are total crooks.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Id have more appreciation and trust in an llm that disagreed with me more and challenged my opinions or prior beliefs. The sycophancy drives me towards not trusting anything it says.
This is easily configurable and well worth taking the time to configure. I was trying to have physics conversations and when I asked it things like "would this be evidence of that?" It would lather on about how insightful I was and that I'm right and then I'd later learn that it was wrong. I then installed this , which I am pretty sure someone else on HN posted... I may have tweaked it I can't remember: Prioritize tr…
When it "prioritizes truth over comfort" (in my experience) it almost always starts posting generic popular answers to my questions, at least when I did this previously in the 4o days. I refer to it as "Reddit Frontpage Mode".
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not simply "training". What's the point of training on prompts? You can't learn the answer to a question by training on the question. For Anthropic at least it's also opt-in not opt-out afaik.
I think the prompts might actually really useful for training, especially for generating synthetic data.
Yeah and that's a little more concerning than training to me, because it means employees have to read your prompts. But you can think of various ways they could preprocess/summarize them to anonymize them.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if statistically (hand waving here, I’m so not an expert in this field) the SOTA models do as much or as little harm as their human counterparts in terms of providing safe and effective emotional support. Totally agree we should better understand the risks and trade offs but I wouldn’t be super surprised if they are statistically no worse than us meat bags this kind of stuff.
One difference is that if it were found that a psychiatrist or other professional had encouraged a patient's delusions or suicidal tendencies, then that person would likely lose his/her license and potentially face criminal penalties. We know that humans should be able to consider the consequences of their actions and thus we hold them accountable (generally). I'd be surprised if comparisons in the self-driving space…
> that person would likely lose his/her license and potentially face criminal penalties.
What if it were an unlicensed human encouraging someone else's delusions? I would think that's the real basis of comparison, because these LLMs are clearly not licensed therapists, and we can see from the real world how entire flat earth communities have formed from reinforcing each others' delusions.
Automation makes things easier and more efficient, and that includes making it easier and more efficient for people to dig their own rabbit holes. I don't see why LLM providers are to blame for someone's lack of epistemological hygiene.
Also, there are a lot of people who are lonely and for whatever reasons cannot get their social or emotional needs met in this modern age. Paying for an expensive psychiatrist isn't going to give them the friendship sensations they're craving. If AI is better at meeting human needs than actual humans are, why let perfect be the enemy of good?
> if waymo is better than the average driver, but still gets into an accident, who should be held accountable?
Waymo of course -- but Waymo also shouldn't be financially punished any harder than humans would be for equivalent honest mistakes. If Waymo truly is much safer than the average driver (which it certainly appears to be), then the amortized costs of its at-fault payouts should be way lower than the auto insurance costs of hiring out an equivalent number of human Uber drivers.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI said that only ~4% of generated tokens are for programming. ChatGPT is overwhelmingly, unambiguously, a "regular people" product.
I mean, yes, but also because it's not as good as Claude today. Bit of a self fulfilling prophecy and they seem to be measuring the wrong thing. 4% of their tokens or total tokens in the market?
You're underestimating the amount of general population that's using ChatGPT. Us, people using it for codegen, are extreme minority.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#248I'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.
Huh really? It’s the exact opposite of my experience. I find gpt-5-high to be by far the most accurate of the models in following instructions over a longer period of time. Also much less prone to losing focus when context size increases
Are you using the -codex variants or the normal ones?
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you propose we address the therapist shortage then?
Who ever claimed there was a therapist shortage?
The process of providing personal therapy doesn't scale well.
And I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is pretty fucked up right now.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can just tell the AI to not be warm and it will remember. My ChatGPT used the phrase "turn it up to eleven" and I told it never to speak in that manner ever again and its been very robotic ever since.
I added the custom instruction "Please go straight to the point, be less chatty". Now it begins every answer with: "Straight to the point, no fluff:" or something similar. It seems to be perfectly unable to simply write out the answer without some form of small talk first.
Aren't these still essentially completion models under the hood?
If so, my understanding for these preambles is that they need a seed to complete their answer.