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Comment by NitpickLawyer | Hacker News Reader

What a bad article. I mean how biased can you be, to put the first big quote from someone who wrote a book called "The AI con". Come on! This feels like the "deepseek r1 is the death of nvda" of 6 months ago. Someone is making a play, and whoever wrote this article fell for it.

gpt5 has always been about making a "collection of models" work together and not about model++. This was announced what, a year ago? And they delivered. Capabilities ~90-110% of their top tier old models at 4-6x lower price. That's insane!

gpt5-mini is insane for its price, in agentic coding. I've had great sessions with it, at 0.x$ / session. It can do things that claude 3.5/3.7 couldn't do ~6 months ago, at 10-15x the price. Whatever RL they did is working wonders.

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> gpt5 has always been about making a "collection of models" work together and not about model++.

No, it wasn’t. Have you read and listened to Altman’s hype around GPT-5 from a year ago? They changed the narration after the 4.1 flop, which they thought would be GPT-5, and it seems some people fell for it.

> Capabilities ~90-110% of their top tier old models at 4-6x lower price

Maybe they finally implemented the DeepSeek paper.

> No, it wasn’t.

I replied below in this thread with the specific post, 6 months ago.

> After that, a top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks.

> In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3. We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model.

"the delta between 5 and 4 will be the same as between 4 and 3"[1]

Obviously it's not.

1. https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript/

GPT-4 was a long time ago, and honestly mostly useless. But a lot of that progress was already present in the intervening models, and it's easy to forget it happened when comparing GPT-5 to the state of the art a month ago rather than two years ago.

This is hard to quantify exactly since very few benchmarks have the kind of scales where comparing two deltas would be meaningful. But if we pick the Artifical Analysis composite score[0] as the baseline, GPT-3.5 Turbo was at 11, GPT-4 at 25, and GPT-5 at 69. It's just that most of the post-GPT-4 improvement was with o1 and o3.

Feels like a pretty fair statement.

[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/#frontier-language-model-intel...

This is Altman before the release:

OpenAI's CEO says he's scared of GPT-5

https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/op...

Sam Altman Compares OpenAI To The Manhattan Project—And He's Not Joking About the Risks

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-compares-openai-ma...

This is Altman after the release:

Sam Altman says ‘yes,’ AI is in a bubble

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/s...

> gpt5 has always been about making a "collection of models" work together and not about model++.

That is revisionist history. Look at Altman's hype statements in the weeks and months leading up to gpt5, some of which were quoted in the article. He never proposed gpt5 as what you're saying and indeed he claimed a massive leap in model performance.

> https://x.com/sama/status/1889755723078443244?lang=en

> In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3. We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model.

6 months ago.

There's also another one, earlier that says gpt5 will be about routing things to the appropriate model, and not necessarily a new model per se. Could have been in a podcast. Anyway, receipts have been posted :)

> What a bad article. I mean how biased can you be, to put the first big quote from someone who wrote a book called "The AI con".

It's an op-ed. It's supposed to be biased.

This is my biggest issue with online newspapers. With print it is very clear if you are in the op-ed section. Online not so much

I have a feeling if someone wrote an article about how great GPT-5 is and the first big quote was from Sam Altman, you'd say it's a cool article.

It's only "bias" when you don't like it.

This is an Opinion piece, not a news article. The distinction between the two seems to be lost on most people nowadays.

One way I leverage opinion pieces for things with which I disagree, is to treat it as a sort of "devil's advocate". What argument are they making? Is that really the strongest one they have? Does my understanding of that domain effectively counter those arguments? etc.

In this case, the main argumentation is on how ChatGPT is not the miraculous genie it was hyped up to be. That's a fair statement, but to extrapolate that into "AI bubble is crashing now" is overlooking a host of other facts about its usefulness. Yes we'll eventually hit the through of disillusionment but I don't think we're there yet.

You are right. But newspapers make it difficult to distinguish them. Opinion pieces are liberally distributed amid news items. LA Times has a Columns section on the right hand side. But, this particular piece is not listed there. It is listed next to other news articles.

> This was announced what, a year ago?

Source? Others are calling out this as being incorrect, so a source would help people evaluate this claim. Personally I'm much more likely to believe that AI companies are moving the goalposts rather than making significant leaps forward.

I posted the tweet below, please check it there. It was 6 months ago.

Media orgs (well journalists really) are especially hostile towards AI and it's easy to see understand why.

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