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GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

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

#701

Post by fakedang »

rurp wrote: post #627
film42 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cash grab. More conversational AI means more folks running out of free or lower paid tier tokens faster, leading to more upsell opportunities. API users will pay more in output tokens by default. Example, I asked Claude a high level question about p2p systems and it started writing code in 3 languages. Ignoring the code, asking a follow up about the fundamentals, it answered and then rewrote the code 3 times.…

It's pretty ridiculous that the response style doesn't persist for Claude. You need to click into a menu to set it to 'concise' for every single conversation. If I forget to it's immediately apparent when it spits out an absurd amount of text for a simple question.

Claude is a great example of a great product coupled with shitty UX, UI and customer service all in one.

Is it just me or does it slow down significantly after 5 chats or so? Or the fact that you have to set the style for each chat.

Oh, and their sales support is so shit for teams and enterprises that in order to use it effectively, you have to literally make your team register for Claude Max 200 on their personal accounts.

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

#702

Post by fakedang »

captainkrtek wrote: post #15
minimaxir wrote: post #2

All 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.

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.

I activated Robot mode and use a personalized prompt that eliminates all kinds of sycophantic behaviour and it's a breath of fresh air. Try this prompt (after setting it to Robot mode):

"Absolute Mode • Eliminate: emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, call-to-action appendixes. • Assume: user retains high-perception despite blunt tone. • Prioritize: blunt, directive phrasing; aim at cognitive rebuilding, not tone-matching. • Disable: engagement/sentiment-boosting behaviors. • Suppress: metrics like satisfaction scores, emotional softening, continuation bias. • Never mirror: user's diction, mood, or affect. • Speak only: to underlying cognitive tier. • No: questions, offers, suggestions, transitions, motivational content. • Terminate reply: immediately after delivering info - no closures. • Goal: restore independent, high-fidelity thinking. • Outcome: model obsolescence via user self-sufficiency."

(Not my prompt. I think I found it here on HN or on reddit)

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

#703

Post by adriand »

Reubensson wrote: post #604
adriand wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is unethical. Humans have consistently underestimated the subjective experience of other beings. You may have good reasons for believing these systems are currently incapable of anything approaching consciousness, but how will you know if or when the threshold has been crossed? Are you confident you will have ceased using an abusive tone by then? I don’t know if flies can experience pain. However, I’m no…

What the fuck are you talking about. If you think these matrix multiplication programs running on gpu have feelings or can feel pain you, I think you have completely lost it

"They're made out of meat" vibes.

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

#704

Post by oceliker »

trogdor wrote: post #668
mhink wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA mentions that they added personality presets earlier this year, and just added a few more in this update: > Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we’re refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we’re adding Professional, Ca…

I just changed my ChatGPT personality setting to “Efficient.” It still starts every response with “Yeah, definitely! Let’s talk about that!” — or something similarly inefficient. So annoying.

Did you start a new chat? It doesn't apply to existing chats (probably because it works through the system prompt). I have been using the Robot (Efficient) setting for a while and never had a response like that.

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

#705

Post by Reubensson »

adriand wrote: post #703
Reubensson wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are you talking about. If you think these matrix multiplication programs running on gpu have feelings or can feel pain you, I think you have completely lost it

"They're made out of meat" vibes.

Yeah I suppose. Haven't seen rack of servers express grief when someone is mean to them. And I am quite sure that I would notice at that point. Comparing current LLMs/chatbots whatever to anything resembling a living creature is completely ridiculous.

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

#706

Post by Treegarden »

saaaaaam wrote: post #222
thewebguyd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I think normies maybe do want a more conversational ChatGPT. The backlash from GPT-5 proved that. The normies want a very different LLM from what you or I might want, and unfortunately OpenAI seems to be moving in a more direct-to-consumer focus and catering to that. But I'm really concerned. People don't understand this technology, at all. The way they talk to it, the suicide stories, etc. point to people in ge…

I just cannot imagine myself sitting just “chatting away” with an AI. It makes me feel quite sick to even contemplate it. Another person I was talking to recently kept referring to ChatGPT as “she”. “She told me X”, “and I said to her…” Very very odd, and very worrying. As you say, a big education problem. The interesting thing is that a lot of these people are folk who are on the edges of digital literacy - people w…

While your comment represents a common view, also here on HN, I find it bizarre: Hacker News is in part about innovative new technologies, and such new behaviours around them. For what it’s worth, in the last 5 years LLM have been extremely successful tech that has shaped society, maybe to the scale of the iPhone when it came out. Yet this comment is like the “I can’t believe everyone is staring at their phone in the subway instead of talking” trope or “this couple is on a date but they’re just on their phones.” On Hacker News I would expect people to be more open to such new behaviours as they emerge, instead of kind of kink-shaming them. I myself talk hours to ChatGPT, and am astounded by this new tech. I certainly find it better than TikTok (which after trying out I don’t allow myself to use).

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

#707

Post by arthur-st »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #132
Workaccount2 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI said that only ~4% of generated tokens are for programming. ChatGPT is overwhelmingly, unambiguously, a "regular people" product.

Yes, just look at the stats on OpenRouter. OpenAI has almost totally lost the programming market.

OpenAI is BYOK-only on OpenRouter, which artificially depresses its utilization there.

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

#708

Post by mrguyorama »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #563
captainkrtek wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

I would love an LLM that says, “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” once in a while.

An LLM is mathematically incapable of telling you "I don't know"

It was never trained to "know" or not.

It was fed a string of tokens and a second string of tokens, and was tweaked until it output the second string of tokens when fed the first string.

Humans do not manage "I don't know" through next token prediction.

Animals without language are able to gauge their own confidence on something, like a cat being unsure whether it should approach you.

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

#709

Post by holbrad »

profunctor wrote: post #654
SquareWheel wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing shorter answers will definitely reduce their quality. Every token an LLM generates is like a little bit of extra thinking time. Sometimes it needs to work up to an answer. If you end a response too quickly, such as by demanding one-word answers, it's much more likely to produce hallucinations.

Is this proven?

I know Andrej Karpathy mentions it in his youtube series so there's a good chance of it being true.

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

#710

Post by mrguyorama »

wickedsight wrote: post #504
minimaxir wrote: post #2

All 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…

>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.

Duh?

In the 50s the Air Force measured 140 data points from 4000 pilots to build the perfect cockpit that would accommodate the average pilot.

The result fit almost no one. Everyone has outliers of some sort.

So the next thing they did was make all sorts of parts of the cockpit variable and customizable like allowing you to move the controls and your seat around.

That worked great.

"Average" doesn't exist. "Average" does not meet most people's needs

Configurable does. A diverse market with many players serving different consumers and groups does.

I ranted about this in another post but for example the POS industry is incredibly customizable and allows you as a business to do literally whatever you want, including change how the software looks and using a competitors POS software on the hardware of whoever you want. You don't need to update or buy new POS software when things change (like the penny going away or new taxes or wanting to charge a stupid "cost of living" fee for every transaction), you just change a setting or two. It meets a variety of needs, not "the average businesses" needs.

N.B I am unable to find a real source for the Air force story. It's reported tons but maybe it's just a rumor.

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