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GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

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Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#251
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Anthropic have a max subscription for corporate. Codex is only pay-as-you-go pricing beyond the base plan. Hence I'm stuck with Opus for work for the foreseeable future.

> Codex is only pay-as-you-go pricing beyond the base plan I don't think so, I'm on a ~$200 subscription (guessing that counts as way beyond "base plan") and have no pay-as-you-go pricing at all, using the OpenAI APIs would be way too expensive for me.

For corporate *

You can't use sub pricing with orgs w/ OpenAI.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are stochastic. You build reliable processes out of unreliable parts with feedback and self-correcting mechanisms. AI is not actually magically special in this regard. It has higher variance and we're still figuring out how to get all the tradeoffs right.

The big problem is that a person making a mistake can be taught to not make that mistake again. That's also not foolproof but at least it works a lot of the times. AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck. That is to say I do agree that building reliable processes out of unreliable parts with feedback is the modus operandi. However A…

> The big problem is that a person making a mistake can be taught to not make that mistake again. That's also not foolproof but at least it works a lot of the times. AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck.

I feel like this line of thinking is kind of an unfair comparison. I'm not saying LLMs are magical beings that can suddenly learn by themselves after getting something wrong, but your "person making mistake then being corrected" assumes you do tell the person about the mistake and tell them to avoid doing the same mistake in the future, but for the "LLM making mistake" example you then intentionally avoid letting the prompt being changed in response to the mistake, which would be the "then being corrected" part on the LLM side of the comparison.

Similarly, if you just let a person make a mistake and don't let them know about the mistake, they might keep making that same mistake over and over again.

If you update how you use the LLM as you discover what mistakes it does, just like you'd correct a person, then you can use an LLM and also the LLM can "be taught to not make that mistake again".

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#254
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. If you told a customer support rep that you are the former US president [0], they would not hand over the account straight away because you asked nicely. These models are great tools, but putting them and people on the same level does a disservice to our species and also is simply incorrect to what we know these models to be and their capabilities/limitations. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/j…

I didn't put them on the same level. At the same time, one should acknowledge that not all tasks are on the same level.

Most tasks we use computers for are deterministic and was coded for that specific quality. Introducing nom deterministic behavior is lowering the value of the app, especially for power users.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#255

I wonder if it's related that that OpenAI has found a way to cut inference costs by half, according to The Information. https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/ai-agenda/openai-...

I wonder if AI labs are actively manipulating the narrative (and thus investor sentiment) by airing problems, and then solving them weeks to months later. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot of stuff figured out that is not included in the current version, just to make a steady product cycle with years of tangible improvements from one version to another (this is a common practice in the industry).

For example, if inference isn't too expensive, but they figure out how to cut costs, then price goes down. After all, why pay OpenAI when a smaller datacenter can give you similar models?

But, if they make a huge issue about how inference is too expensive, they engineer a crisis of their own creation - then, once they deploy the solution (which they might already have), then they're back on top.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are stochastic. You build reliable processes out of unreliable parts with feedback and self-correcting mechanisms. AI is not actually magically special in this regard. It has higher variance and we're still figuring out how to get all the tradeoffs right.

The big problem is that a person making a mistake can be taught to not make that mistake again. That's also not foolproof but at least it works a lot of the times. AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck. That is to say I do agree that building reliable processes out of unreliable parts with feedback is the modus operandi. However A…

Indeed. Any meaningful AGI/ASI will have to have a form of memory / continual learning. Sam Altman said last year that this will be the focus for GPT-6.

The whole "soul.md" stuff today is a poor approximation to that. But I wonder whether it will grow into it, like chain of thought prompting grew into reasoning models.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He sure did seem to speed run the 'tech leader with scruples' to 'tech villain' path! What kind of rosy-eyed chump believes in the "tech leader with scruples" bullshit? It always lies. Did some people just ignore Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook's sociopathy, somehow? Did anyone buy into their "privacy is a human right" nonsense?

I find this kind of cynicism fascinating tbh. On the one hand, it seems so relatable in some ways, because there is something uncomfortable about being seen as naive, in a way that being seen as cynical or negative doesn't seem to carry. I guess it's just self-protective, almost like some kind of perverse Pascal's wager: it's better to think everyone is horrible and be wrong than to think the opposite and be taken ad…

> I just don't know why it would actually be true that everyone at the top is a villain

History.

Also, nobody said 'everyone' or 'villain'. How Paul Graham of you.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#258
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not including their best model in a max subscription would otherwise be truly a good reason for once to consider going back to openai for me. I'll at least try it.

At least Anthropic have a max subscription for corporate. Codex is only pay-as-you-go pricing beyond the base plan. Hence I'm stuck with Opus for work for the foreseeable future.

Apparently not? At least our it guy said after 150 people or so you have to pay for enterprise which is pay per token for everyone.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#259

there seems to be very big misunderstanding about what the "ultra" is, so let me explain it basing on the codex source code: it's similar to Claude code ultracode. there is no ultra effort level implemented on the backend. it's just alias in the codex to max effort setting and single line addition to prompt to use subagents proactively. that's all as far as we know pro models work differently. for once those are back…

> single line addition to prompt to use subagents proactively.

This misses an important detail. In Claude Code [1], ultracode suggests the agent create a JavaScript code to deterministically orchestrate sub agents. This is different from just having the main agent launch sub agents and (non-deterministically) manage them.

The resulting workflow is called “dynamic” because CC creates this orchestration script dynamically, “on the fly”.

[1] https://claude.com/blog/introducing-dynamic-workflows-in-cla...

Another useful thing about dynamic workflows is you can ask Claude to make them durable as skills (or slash command) that can be invoked later.

I believe inside Google they have a similar concept called “deterministic workflows”.

I find ultracode extremely useful. Of course you have to watch how your 5 hour and weekly session usage percentages are getting used. So I had Claude make a status-line with 3 progress bars: for context window, 5h session, 7d session:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/statusl...

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are stochastic. You build reliable processes out of unreliable parts with feedback and self-correcting mechanisms. AI is not actually magically special in this regard. It has higher variance and we're still figuring out how to get all the tradeoffs right.

The big problem is that a person making a mistake can be taught to not make that mistake again. That's also not foolproof but at least it works a lot of the times. AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck. That is to say I do agree that building reliable processes out of unreliable parts with feedback is the modus operandi. However A…

> AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck.

If the Model makes repeated mistakes on the same subject matter, you can update your agent.md file, or you can add skills to deal with specific prompts, or you provide a better default harness.

The whole idea of coding agents is their harness makes a big difference vs a pure raw model.

> However AI cannot meaningfully handle feedback and learn

How do you think models are created? They are trained on feedback and learn.

Its not cheap but you can post train models. This is how custom models are mode, that deal with specific tasks more efficiently and accurately.

Example ... Composer? Its base Kimi v2.5 model that has been post-trained 2 weeks, to create Composer 2.5, what is a much better coding model.

Its literally trained to make less mistakes by feeding it correct data. Hell, a lot of the models you are using, are often the same base model, where v2.0 was the initial released model but the model keeps training, so when they release v2.1, its still the same model, but with more training time on feedback provided to v2.0.

LLM Models are not a cake you cook one time and they are done, and you start from zero again. If you have the money, and a powerful server setup, you can take a model like GLM 5.2 and post-train it, to reduce specific errors. Sure, you need a ton of money because its a large model.

But people have been doing this with 5M, 100M, 1B, 5B models for a long time already. To the point that some of the small models can do specific tasks, almost or better then some of the huge more general trained models.

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