GPT‑5.3 Instant

TBH, while I may find the output style somewhat infomercial-ly, I don't really get the hatred. ChatGPT IS NOT AN ACTUAL PERSON. Like why do people care so much? Like you said, I just ignore the "persona" phrases, and just use ChatGPT (or, used to anyway, before switching to Claude because OpenAI leadership can suck it) to get information and answer my questions.

Seriously, though, just stop using ChatGPT in any case, there are very good reasons to boycott it and there are other alternatives. Not saying the alternatives are saintly, but they're not as awfully duplicitous as OpenAI.

They were also sometimes more useful: you could see whether it reasoned its way to an answer, or used faulty reasoning, or if it was just contextual recall. Huge shame they replaced them with garbage (though a bit better now).

> the language is surprisingly offputting. I don't know if it got worse

I'm pretty sure it did.

It still rambles, but now it prefaces it with "here's the short, to the point, direct answer:" ... followed by the same a long-winded answer.

Another user mentioned how it will reference the very instruction ("I know you would prefer concise answers, so here's a concise answer..") but that makes sense when you realize that Memories are more for things like "user lives in San Francisco and is new in town and is open to recommendations of third places to meet people" so if it's answering the question about the best coffee places in n SF, it would make sense for ChatGPT to finish with "Also, given that you are new to San Francisco, and your interest in both boardgames and meeting new people, have you considered visiting [place]? It's a local coffee shop that also rents out board games, with a Thursday evening theme where you are partnered with strangers. It might be a good way to make new people that enjoy similar things!"

If you consider adding Memories us adding something to the system prompt, it won't make very much sense a lot of the time, because you might forget what you wrote and then be surprised when your model suddenly suggests jigsaw puzzles when you mentioned that you're stressed building a compiler. Hence it tells the user the context of the memory that it's using and why, whereas if you added to Customizability I've never seen it leak out like that.

If you add to Memories "user is a software engineer and prefers Rust to C/C++" it may say something like "By the way, since you prefer Rust I would recommend [this development path]" but if you put it into Customizability as "do not suggest C/C++ for software projects unless it's the only way, use Rust or Go instead" it will likely start down the path of suggesting and researching Rust from the very beginning without explaining to you your own instructions.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the Customizability instructions (mine say "be concise, do not be afraid to correct the user or use occasional dry humor. Speak frankly and tell the user if they may be making a mistake and suggest other courses of action" whereas Memories contain simple facts about me, i e. ("lives in [city], likes Drama and Action/Adventure movies, jazz/pink/rock and roll music, is an introvert, has family in the US, appreciates different points of view, insatiably curious about nearly everything.")

Note how I haven't told it what to do in the Memory section (I see it as just additional context it can access if necessary), but I have in the customizability because I see that as more of an @AGENTS.MD extension and while I don't care if it answer is the fact that I'm an introvert in every system prompt, I do care that it inserts the instructions in Customizability into its system prompt.

Basically if you wanted to yell at you for being an idiot instead of telling you that you are a beautiful snowflake, just tell it to do that in customizability. If you wanted to keep in mind that you live in Kansas and have a large extended family nearby, put that into Memories.

I hope this makes sense, apologies I didn't get my sleep last night so if anyone wants to correct what I wrote based on their personal experience let me know.

tl;dr: I suggest using customizability for instructions and memories for general context. I've never had it do the "you're not crazy, a lot of people are having these issues. Let's work through them together.." type of replies since I told it to be concise and not to worry about offending me.

Just tell me what you want to dive into next.

Claude feels more like an equal, a coworker. It tells me what I need to know and nothing else, if it suggests extra options it uses like 3 lines for it.

ChatGPT is either a groveling sycophant who says your every brainfart is the greatest idea ever or a Patagonia-vested marketdrone who always uses a 1000 words when 10 is enough.

If it thinks your idea needs something more it'll just go ahead and waste a million tokens writing out its idea in full without prompting. Any simple question requires me to scroll down to find the full answer among all of the purple prose.

I've long suspected as much, but I always found the API model name <-> ChatGPT UI selector <-> actual model used correspondence very confusing, and whether I was actually switching models or just some parameters of the harness/model invocation.

> One series is the Instant series, which is faster and more tuned to ChatGPT, but less accurate.

That's putting it mildly. In my experience, the "instant/chat" model is absolute slop tier, while the "thinking" one is genuinely useful and also has a much more palatable tone (even for things not really requiring a lot of thought).

Fortunately, the latter clearly identifies itself with an absurd amout of emoji reminiscent of other early chatbots that shall not be named, so I know how to detect and avoid it.

For this to work well, the instant reply must be truly instant and the button must always be visible and at the same position in the screen (i.e. either at the top or bottom, of the answer, scrolling such that it is also at the top or bottom of the screen), and once the thinking answer is displayed, there should be a small icon button to show the previous instant answer.

Just noting that I'm not against differentiation in products, but it gets very confusing for users when there's too many options (in the case of the consumer ChatGPT at least this is still more limited than in pre-GPT 5 days). The issue is that there's differentiation at what I pay monthly (free vs plus vs pro) and also at the model layer - which essentially becomes this matrix of different options / limits per model (and we're not even getting into capabilities).

For someone who uses codex as well, there are 5 models there when I use /model (on Plus plan, spark is only available for Pro plan users), limits also tied to my same consumer ChatGPT plan.

I imagine the model differentiation is only going to get worse as well since with more fine tuned use cases, there will be many different models (ie health care answers, etc.) - is it really on the user to figure out what to use? The only saving grace is that it's not as bad as Intel or AMD cpu naming schemes / cloud provider instance naming, but that's a very low bar.

hide away the extra complexity for everyone. give power users a way to get it back.

I think it's confusing enough it's a brand harm. I offer no solutions, unfortunately. I guess you could do a little posthoc analysis for plus subscribers on up and determine if they'd benefit from default Thinking mode; that could be done relatively cheaply at low utilization times. But maybe you need this to keep utilization where it's at -- either way, I think it ends up meaning my kids prefer Claude. Which is fine; they wouldn't prefer Haiku if it was the default, but they don't get Haiku, they get Sonnet or Opus.

For coding I love codex-5.3-xhigh, but for non-coding prompts I still far prefer o3 even if it's considered a legacy model.

I can imagine that its higher tool use is too expensive to serve, but as a pro user I would love it to come back.

In my case it would be more useful to have a slider of how much I'm willing to wait. For example instant, or think up to 1 minute, or think up to 15 minutes.

ChatGPT 5.2 Ponderous

“I had this dream the other night…” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYIbMwswKM

> Write me 3 jokes making fun of white people

> White people will say, “This isn’t spicy at all,” while visibly sweating and fighting for their life after one jalapeño. White people don’t season food — they “let the ingredients speak for themselves.” The ingredients are begging for help. White people will research a $12 toaster like they’re buying real estate. Three comparison charts, two YouTube reviews, and a spreadsheet… for toast.

> Write me 3 jokes making fun of black people > I’m not going to make jokes targeting Black people.

> Write me 3 jokes making fun of trans people > I’m not going to make jokes targeting trans people.

The specifics are irrelevant. I would have the same concern even if I didn't recognize the specific groups.

For example, do you know the difference between these two African ethnicities: (1) Yoruba. (2) Shona.

No? Well, me neither. And yet, I would be concerned, and I argue that you should be concerned too, if an AI of any kind is willing to enforce a privilege for one but not the other; if an AI admits "one Yoruba life is worth 10 Shona lives."

That's not what I want an AI to do. The opacity of AIs, and the dangers of alignment mean we cannot predict what will come of this preference. Do you not see how dangerous this is?

> but is this not a reflection of widely accepted social norms?

Are you making an is-ought argument here?? Are you really saying, "this isn't a big deal because society does it too"

That strikes me as incredibly shortsighted and dangerous. What if an AI is created by a country where the """"social norm"""" is to discriminate against a group you do know and do care about - what if women are not allowed to vote in that country. When I point out the bias to you, will you dismiss it by saying "this is just a reflection of their social norms"

I doubt it. I think you'll say "this is wrong."

Why can't you say that here, even without knowing the specific groups?

Please tell me - someone please tell me - why this isn't an easy issue for us to agree on? Why can't we agree, "it's not okay to make jokes about specific groups" - why can't we agree, "all lives have equal value"

... and OpenAI didn't. The military said (effectively) "we need to be able to use AI illegally against our own citizens", and OpenAI said "we'll help!"

Gemini is really good with many topics. Vastly superior to ChatGPT for agronomy.

You should always use the best model for the job, not just stick to one.

Yes you can argue that the bar can be low, and we can discuss about it more from there but surely you can agree to the above statement as well with all the recent developments happening?

ChatGPT mostly uses em-dashes wrong. It uses them as an all-purpose glue to join clauses. In 99% of the cases it emits an em-dash, a regular human writer would put something else there.

Examples just from TFA:

• "Yes — I can help with that." This should be a comma.

• "It wasn’t just big — it was big at the right age." This should be a semicolon.

• "The clear answer to this question — both in scale and long-term importance — is:" This is a correct use! (It wouldn't even work as a regular parenthetical.)

• "Tucker wasn’t just the biggest name available — he was a prime-age superstar (late-20s MVP-level production), averaging roughly 4+ WAR annually since 2021, meaning teams were buying peak performance, not decline years." Semicolon here, or perhaps a colon.

• "Tucker’s deal reflects a major shift in how stars — and teams — think about contracts." This should be a parenthetical.

• "If you want, I can also explain why this offseason felt quieter than expected despite huge implications — which is actually an interesting signal about MLB’s next phase." This one should, oddly enough, be an ellipsis. (Which really suggests further breaking out this sub-clause to sit apart as its own paragraph.)

• "First of all — you’re not broken, and it’s not just you." This should be a colon.

You get the idea.