I wish they would keep 4.1 around for a bit longer. One of the downsides of the current reasoning based training regimens is a significant decrease in creativity. And chat trained AIs were already quite "meh" at creative writing to begin with. 4.1 was the last of its breed.

So we'll have to wait until "creativity" is solved.

Side note: I've been wondering lately about a way to bring creativity back to these thinking models. For creative writing tasks you could add the original, pretrained model as a tool call. So the thinking model could ask for its completions and/or query it and get back N variations. The pretrained model's completions will be much more creative and wild, though often incoherent (think back to the GPT-3 days). The thinking model can then review these and use them to synthesize a coherent, useful result. Essentially giving us the best of both worlds. All the benefits of a thinking model, while still giving it access to "contained" creativity.