Live data from Hacker News

GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

openai.com

411–420 of 766 posts

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#411

"Warmer and more conversational" - they're basically admitting GPT-5 was too robotic. The real tell here is splitting into Instant vs Thinking models explicitly. They've given up on the unified model dream and are now routing queries like everyone else (Anthropic's been doing this, Google's Gemini too). Calling it "GPT-5.1 Thinking" instead of o3-mini or whatever is interesting branding. They're trying to make reason…

The pre-GPT-5 absurdly confusing proliferation of non-totally-ordered model numbers was clearly a mistake. Which is better for what: 4.1, 4o, o1, or o3-mini? Impossible to guess unless you already know. I’m not surprised they’re being more consistent in their branding now.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#413

it feels incredibly dumb now, getting some really basic questions wrong and just throwing nuance to the wind. for claiming to be more human, it understands far less. for example: if I start at a negative net worth how long until I am a millionaire if I consistently grow 2.5% each month? Anyone here would have a basic understand the premise and be able to start answering, 5.1 says it's impossible, with hand holding it…

Your question doesn’t make sense to me as stated. I interpret “consistently grow at 2.5% per month” as every month, your net worth is multiplied by 1.025 in which case it will indeed never change sign. If there is some other positive “income” term then that needs to be explicitly stated otherwise the premise is contradicted.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#414
post #82
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the personality selector is for: you can just pick 'Efficient' (formerly Robot) and it does a good job of answering tersely? https://share.cleanshot.com/9kBDGs7Q

Unfortunately, I also don't want other people to interact with a sycophantic robot friend, yet my picker only applies to my conversation

You’re getting downvoted but I agree with the sentiment. The fact that people want a conversational robot friend is, I think, extremely harmful and scary for humanity.

Giving people what makes them feel good in the short term is not actually necessarily a good thing. See also: cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, etc.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like arguing that we shouldn't try to regulate drugs because some people might "want" the heroin that ruins their lives. The existing "personalities" of LLMs are dangerous, full stop. They are trained to generate text with an air of authority and to tend to agree with anything you tell them. It is irresponsible to allow this to continue while not at least deliberately improving education around their use. Thi…

Disincentivizing something undesirable will not necessarily lead to better results, because it wrongly assumes that you can foresee all consequences of an action or inaction. Someone who now falls in love with an LLM might instead fall for some seductress who hurts him more. Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever.

Your argument suggests that we shouldn’t ever make laws or policy of any kind, which is clearly wrong.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#416
Looks like a new model trained to be warmer and friendlier to users. Time to reshare our work: https://arxiv.org/html/2507.21919

> Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth undermines their reliability, especially when users express vulnerability. We conducted controlled experiments on five language models of varying sizes and architectures, training them to produce warmer, more empathetic responses, then evaluating them on safety-critical tasks. Warm models showed substantially higher error rates (+10 to +30 percentage points) than their original counterparts, promoting conspiracy theories, providing incorrect factual information, and offering problematic medical advice. They were also significantly more likely to validate incorrect user beliefs, particularly when user messages expressed sadness. Importantly, these effects were consistent across different model architectures, and occurred despite preserved performance on standard benchmarks, revealing systematic risks that current evaluation practices may fail to detect. As human-like AI systems are deployed at an unprecedented scale, our findings indicate a need to rethink how we develop and oversee these systems that are reshaping human relationships and social interaction.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#417

A lot of negativity towards this and OpenAI in general. While skepticism is always good I wonder if this has crossed the line from reasoned into socially reinforced dogpiling. My own experience with GPT 5 thinking and its predecessor o3, both of which I used a lot, is that they were super difficult to work with on technical tasks outside of software. They often wrote extremely dense, jargon filled responses that ofte…

precisely: o3 and gpt5t are great models, super smart and helpful for many things; but they love to talk in this ridiculously overcomplex, insanely terse, handwavy way. when it gets things right, it's awesome. when it confidently gets things wrong, it's infuriating.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#419
post #191

I've switched over to https://thaura.ai , which is working on being a more ethical AI. A side effect I hadn't realized is missing the drama over the latest OpenAI changes.

What a bizarre product. Weirdly political message and ethnic branding. I suppose "ethical AI" means models tuned to their biases instead of "Big Tech AI" biases. Or probably just a proxy to an existing API with a custom system prompt. The least they could've done is check their generated slop images for typos ("STOP GENCCIDE" on the Plans page). The whole thing reeks of the usual "AI" scam site. At best, it's profiti…

[dead]

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#420
post #40

Holy em-dash fest in the examples, would have thought they'd augment the training dataset to reduce this behavior.

I'm glad em dashes exist, they help me spot AI spam.

Lulled into a false sense of security, you'll think you can spot the artificial by the tells that it readily feeds to you. But what happens when deception is the goal?
Post reply on HN