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GPT-5.5

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Re: GPT-5.5

#371
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain how we arrived at the pelican test? Was there some actual theory behind why it's difficult to produce? Or did someone just think it up, discover it was consistently difficult, and now we just all know it's a good test?

I set it up as a joke, to make fun of all of the other benchmarks. To my surprise it ended up being a surprisingly good measure of the quality of the model for other tasks (up to a certain point at least), though I've never seen a convincing argument as to why. I gave a talk about it last year: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/ It should not be treated as a serious benchmark.

What it has going for it is human interpretability.

Anyone can look and decide if it’s a good picture or not. But the numeric benchmarks don’t tell you much if you aren’t already familiar with that benchmark and how it’s constructed.

Re: GPT-5.5

#373

Just as a heads up, even though GPT-5.5 is releasing today, the rollout in ChatGPT and Codex will be gradual over many hours so that we can make sure service remains stable for everyone (same as our previous launches). You may not see it right away, and if you don't, try again later in the day. We usually start with Pro/Enterprise accounts and then work our way down to Plus. We know it's slightly annoying to have to…

Did you guys do anything about GPT‘s motivation? I tried to use GPT-5.4 API (at xhigh) for my OpenClaw after the Anthropic Oauthgate, but I just couldn‘t drag it to do its job. I had the most hilarious dialogues along the lines of „You stopped, X would have been next.“ - „Yeah, I‘m sorry, I failed. I should have done X next.“ - „Well, how about you just do it?“ - „Yep, I really should have done it now.“ - “Do X, righ…

I always use the phrase "Let's do X" instead of asking (Could you...) or suggesting it do something. I don't see problems with it being motivated.

Re: GPT-5.5

#374

Just as a heads up, even though GPT-5.5 is releasing today, the rollout in ChatGPT and Codex will be gradual over many hours so that we can make sure service remains stable for everyone (same as our previous launches). You may not see it right away, and if you don't, try again later in the day. We usually start with Pro/Enterprise accounts and then work our way down to Plus. We know it's slightly annoying to have to…

Did you guys do anything about GPT‘s motivation? I tried to use GPT-5.4 API (at xhigh) for my OpenClaw after the Anthropic Oauthgate, but I just couldn‘t drag it to do its job. I had the most hilarious dialogues along the lines of „You stopped, X would have been next.“ - „Yeah, I‘m sorry, I failed. I should have done X next.“ - „Well, how about you just do it?“ - „Yep, I really should have done it now.“ - “Do X, righ…

The model has been heavily encouraged to not run away and do a lot without explicit user permission.

So I find myself often in a loop where it says "We should do X" and then just saying "ok" will not make it do it, you have to give it explicit instructions to perform the operation ("make it so", etc)

It can be annoying, but I prefer this over my experiences with Claude Code, where I find myself jamming the escape key... NO NO NO NOT THAT.

I'll take its more reserved personality, thank you.

Re: GPT-5.5

#375

Just as a heads up, even though GPT-5.5 is releasing today, the rollout in ChatGPT and Codex will be gradual over many hours so that we can make sure service remains stable for everyone (same as our previous launches). You may not see it right away, and if you don't, try again later in the day. We usually start with Pro/Enterprise accounts and then work our way down to Plus. We know it's slightly annoying to have to…

Did you guys do anything about GPT‘s motivation? I tried to use GPT-5.4 API (at xhigh) for my OpenClaw after the Anthropic Oauthgate, but I just couldn‘t drag it to do its job. I had the most hilarious dialogues along the lines of „You stopped, X would have been next.“ - „Yeah, I‘m sorry, I failed. I should have done X next.“ - „Well, how about you just do it?“ - „Yep, I really should have done it now.“ - “Do X, righ…

I also had a frustrating but funny conversation today where I asked ChatGPT to make one document from the 10 or so sections that we had previously worked on. It always gave only brief summaries. After I repeated my request for the third time, it told me I should just concatenate the sections myself because it would cost too many tokens if it did it for me.

Re: GPT-5.5

#377

> One engineer at NVIDIA who had early access to the model went as far as to say: "Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.” This quote is more sinister than I think was intended; it likely applies to all frontier coding models. As they get better, we quickly come to rely on them for coding. It's like playing a game on God Mode. Engineers become dependent; it's truly addictive. This matches my o…

You’re still the one that’s controlling the model though and steering it with your expertise. At least that’s what I tell myself at night :)

I haven’t really thought about this before, but you’re right, it feels a bit uneasy for me too.

Re: GPT-5.5

#378

> One engineer at NVIDIA who had early access to the model went as far as to say: "Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.” This quote is more sinister than I think was intended; it likely applies to all frontier coding models. As they get better, we quickly come to rely on them for coding. It's like playing a game on God Mode. Engineers become dependent; it's truly addictive. This matches my o…

> It's literally higher leverage for me to go for a walk

Touching grass while you're outside might yield highest leverage.

Re: GPT-5.5

#380

Everyone talked about the marketing stunt that was Anthropic's gated Mythos model with an 83% result on CyberGym. OpenAI just dropped GPT 5.5, which scores 82% and is open for anybody to use. I recommend anybody in offensive/defensive cybersecurity to experiment with this. This is the real data point we needed - without the hype! Never thought I'd say this but OpenAI is the 'open' option again.

> Never thought I'd say this but OpenAI is the 'open' option again.

Compared to Anthropic, they always have been. Anthropic has never released any open models. Never released Claude Code's source, willingly (unlike Codex). Never released their tokenizer.

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