GPT-5 was highly anticipated and people have thought it would be a step change in performance for a while. I think at some point they had to just do it and rip the bandaid off, so they could move past 5.

Maybe its time to switch to year based versioning, or increment by an integer for every small new feature like everyone else does.

Honestly, I think the big thing is the sycophancy. It's starting to reach the mainstream that ChatGPT can cause people to 'go crazy'.

This gives them an out. "That was the old model, look how much better this one tests on our sycophancy test we just made up!!"

Because it is a 100x training compute model over 4.

GPT5.5 will be a 10X compute jump.

4.5 was 10x over 4.

Even worse optics. They scaled the training compute by 100x and got <1% improvement on several benchmarks.

It is almost as if there’s a documented limit in how much you can squeeze out of autoregressive transformers by throwing compute at it

Is 1% relative to more recent models like o3, or the (old and obsolete at this point) GPT-4?

It was relative to the number the comment I replied to included. I would assume GPT-5 is nowhere near 100x the parameters of o3. My point is that if this release isn't notable because of parameter count, nor (importantly) performance, what is it notable for? I guess it unifies the thinking and non-thinking models, but this is more of a product improvement, not a model improvement.

The fact that it unifies the regular model and the reasoning model is a big change. I’m sure internally it’s a big change, but also in terms of user experience.

I feel it’s worthy of a major increment, even if benchmarks aren’t significantly improved.

Claude code already does that. It is an improvement but not a big change in any way.

Well yeah, but it’s a major break from the previous slate of OpenAI models. What else were they going to call it that makes any sense? o4o?