Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just another sign telling you that OpenAI's end game is selling ads.
I really struggle to see a path where $.01 ad inventory covers the cost of inference, much less training or any other of OpenAI ventures. Unless every query makes you watch a 30 second unskippable video or something equally awful.
GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
571–580 of 766 posts
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#572Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 easi…
> I would think that's the real basis of comparison It's not because that's not the typical case. LLMs encourage people's delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them. Anyone who's used ChatGPT has experienced it even if they didn't realize it. It starts with "that's a really thoughtful question that not many people think to ask", and "you're absolutely right [...]". > If AI is better a…
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#574Earlier 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.
Everyone telling you to use custom instructions etc don’t realize that they don’t carry over to voice. Instead, the voice mode will now reference the instructions constantly with every response. Before: Absolutely, you’re so right and a lot of people would agree! Only a perceptive and curious person such as yourself would ever consider that, etc etc After: Ok here’s the answer! No fluff, no agreeing for the sake of a…
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#575All the examples of "warmer" generations show that OpenAI's definition of warmer is synonymous with sycophantic , which is a surprise given all the criticism against that particular aspect of ChatGPT. I suspect this approach is a direct response to the backlash against removing 4o.
I'm starting to get this feeling that there's no way to satisfy everyone. Some people hate the sycophantic models, some love them. So whatever they do, there's a large group of people complaining. Edit: I also think this is because some people treat ChatGPT as a human chat replacement and expect it to have a human like personality, while others (like me) treat it as a tool and want it to have as little personality as…
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#576It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
My worry is that they're training it on Q&A from the general public now, and that this tone, and more specifically, how obsequious it can be, is exactly what the general public want. Most of the time, I suspect, people are using it like wikipedia, but with a shortcut to cut through to the real question they want answered; and unfortunately they don't know if it is right or wrong, they just want to be told how bright…
LLMs only really make sense for tasks where verifying the solution (which you have to do!) is significantly easier than solving the problem: translation where you know the target and source languages, agentic coding with automated tests, some forms of drafting or copy editing, etc. General search is not one of those! Sure, the machine can give you its sources but it won't tell you about sources it ignored. And verify…
And you can’t even treat implementation as a black box, even using different LLMs, when all the frontier models are trained to have similar biases towards confidence and obsequiousness in making assumptions about the spec!
Verifying the solution in agentic coding is not nearly as easy as it sounds.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consciousness and pain is not an emergent property of computation. This or all the other programs on your computer are already sentient, because it would be highly unlikely it’s specific sequences of instructions, like magic formulas, that creates consciousness. This source code? Draws a chart. This one? Makes the computer feel pain.
Many leading scientists in artificial intelligence do in fact believe that consciousness is an emergent property of computation. In fact, startling emergent properties are exactly what drives the current huge wave of research and investment. In 2010, if you said, “image recognition is not an emergent property of computation”, you would have been proved wrong in just a couple of years.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on one of these products. An incredible amount of money and energy goes into safety. Just a staggering amount. Turns out it’s really hard.
Yes. My position is that it was irresponsible to publish these tools before figuring out safety first, and it is irresponsible to continue to offer LLMs that have been trained in an authoritative voice and to not actively seek to educate people on their shortcomings. But, of course, such action would almost certainly result in a hit to the finances, so we can't have that.
Alternative take: these are incredibly complex nondeterministic systems and it is impossible to validate perfection in a lab environment because 1) sample sizes are too small, and 2) perfection isn’t possible anyway.
All products ship with defects. We can argue about too much or too little or whatever, but there is no world where a new technology or vehicle or really anything is developed to perfection safety before release.
Yeah, profits (or at least revenue) too. But all of these AI systems are losing money hand over fist. Revenue is a signal of market fit. So if there are companies out there burning billions of dollars optimizing the perfectly safe AI system before release, they have no idea if it’s what people want.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll respond to this bait in the hopes that it clicks for someone how to _not_ use an LLM.. Asking "them"... your perspective is already warped. It's not your fault, all the text we've previously ever seen is associated with a human being. Language models are mathematical, statistical beasts. The beast generally doesn't do well with open ended questions (known as "zero-shot"). It shines when you give it something to…
> Language models are mathematical, statistical beasts. The beast generally doesn't do well with open ended questions (known as "zero-shot"). It shines when you give it something to work off of ("one-shot"). That is the usage that is advertised to the general public, so I think it's fair to critique it by way of this usage.
I like to ask these chatbots to generate 25 trivia questions and answers from "golden age" Simpsons. It fabricates complete BS for a noticeable number of them. If I can't rely on it for something as low-stakes as TV trivia, it seems absurd to rely on it for anything else.