[HN Gopher] OpenAI o3-pro
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       OpenAI o3-pro
        
       Author : mfiguiere
       Score  : 272 points
       Date   : 2025-06-10 20:15 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (help.openai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (help.openai.com)
        
       | mmsc wrote:
       | I understand that things are moving fast and all, but surely
       | the.. 8? models which are currently available is a bit ..
       | overwhelming for users that just want to get answers to their
       | questions of life? What's the end goal with having so many models
       | available?
        
         | Osyris wrote:
         | This is a much more expensive model to run and is only
         | available to users who pay the most. I don't see an issue.
         | 
         | However, the "plus" plan absolutely could use some trimming.
        
           | djrj477dhsnv wrote:
           | If it's better (and newer) than gpt4, it shouldn't have a
           | lower version number.
        
         | bachittle wrote:
         | free users don't have this model selector, and probably don't
         | care which model they get so 4o is good enough. paid users at
         | 20$/month get more models which are better, like o3. paid users
         | at 200$/month get the best models that are also costing OpenAI
         | the most money, like o3-pro. I think they plan to unify them
         | with GPT-5.
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | That doesn't help much when we're asymptotically approaching
           | GPT-5. We're probably going to be at GPT-4.9999 soon.
        
             | rfw300 wrote:
             | Not necessarily true. GPT-4.1 was released _after_
             | GPT-4.5-preview. Next model might be GPT-3.7.
        
           | nikcub wrote:
           | I'd be curious what proportion of paid users ever switch
           | models. I'd guess < 10%
        
             | CamperBob2 wrote:
             | I switch to o1-pro on occasion, but it is slow enough that
             | I don't use it as much as some of the others. It is a
             | reasonably-effective last resort when I'm not getting the
             | answer quality that I think should be achievable. It's the
             | best available reasoning model from any provider by a
             | noticeable margin.
             | 
             | Sounds like o3-pro is even slower, which is fine as long as
             | it's better.
             | 
             | o4-mini-high is my usual go-to model if I need something
             | better than the default GPT4-du jour. I don't see much
             | point in the others and don't understand why they remain
             | available. If o3-pro really is consistently better, it will
             | move o1-pro into that category for me.
        
             | CuriouslyC wrote:
             | If you're not at least switching from 4o to 4.1 you're
             | doing it wrong.
        
               | motoxpro wrote:
               | 4o is better than 4.1 for a lot of things that are non-
               | coding/general research.
        
         | macawfish wrote:
         | Overwhelming yet pretty underwhelming
        
         | nickysielicki wrote:
         | I just can't believe nobody at the company has enough courage
         | to tell their leadership that their naming scheme is completely
         | stupid and insane. Four is greater than three, and so four
         | should be better than three. The point of a name is to describe
         | something so that you don't confuse your users, not to be cute.
        
           | browningstreet wrote:
           | At Techcrunch AI last week, the OpenAI guy started his
           | presentation by acknowledging that OpenAI knows their naming
           | is a problem and they're working on it, but it won't be fixed
           | immediately.
        
             | moomin wrote:
             | I know they have a deep relationship with Microsoft, but
             | perhaps they shouldn't have used Microsoft's product naming
             | department.
        
               | orra wrote:
               | Zune .NET O3... _shudders_
        
               | Maken wrote:
               | XBOX Series X
        
             | simonw wrote:
             | Sam Altman has said the same thing on Twitter a few times.
             | https://x.com/sama/status/1911906570835022319
             | 
             | > how about we fix our model naming by this summer and
             | everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us (which we
             | very much deserve) until then?
        
               | nickysielicki wrote:
               | I'd prefer for them to just fix it asap instead and then
               | keep the existing endpoints around for a year as aliases.
        
               | lobsterthief wrote:
               | They will definitely keep the endpoint aliases around for
               | years. No real cost in doing so.
        
               | asah wrote:
               | How about they ask ChatGPT for help !
        
           | MallocVoidstar wrote:
           | The reason their naming scheme is so bad is because their
           | initial attempts at GPT-5 failed in training. It was supposed
           | to be done ~1 year ago. Because they'd promised that GPT-5
           | would be vastly more intelligent than GPT-4, they couldn't
           | just name any random model "GPT-5", so they suddenly had to
           | start naming things differently. So now there's GPT-4.5,
           | GPT-4.1, the o-series, ...
        
             | kaoD wrote:
             | Surely there's a less stupid way than naming two very
             | different models o4 and 4o.
        
           | transcriptase wrote:
           | What's worse is that the app doesn't even have descriptions.
           | As if I'm supposed to memorize the use case for each based
           | on:
           | 
           | GPT-4o
           | 
           | o3
           | 
           | o4-mini
           | 
           | o4-mini-high
           | 
           | GPT-4.5
           | 
           | GPT-4.1
           | 
           | GPT-4.1-mini
        
             | koakuma-chan wrote:
             | Just use o4-mini for everything
        
               | ralfd wrote:
               | Why not o3?
        
               | thimabi wrote:
               | In my experience, o4-mini has been fast and accurate
               | enough for most use cases. If needed, I use o4-mini-high.
               | I just bother to use o3 when there's a gnarly issue to
               | solve and I can wait its long response times.
        
               | koakuma-chan wrote:
               | Because it's slow
        
             | occamschainsaw wrote:
             | Even o3 can't figure out the naming scheme. When asked to
             | generate names that would be easier to use by non-technical
             | people, it assumed o3 and o4 are the smallest models:
             | 
             | ``` Below is one straightforward, user-friendly approach
             | you could adopt. It keeps two dimensions only--generation
             | and tier--and reserves an optional "optimisation" suffix
             | for special-purpose variants (e.g. vision, coding, long-
             | context).
             | 
             | [?]
             | 
             | 1. Core conventions
             | 
             | Element Purpose Example values Generation Major
             | architectural release. Keep a whole number; use ".1",
             | ".2"... for mid-cycle improvements. 4, 4.1, 4.5 Tier Rough
             | capability / cost band, easy to interpret. Lite, Standard,
             | Pro, Ultra Suffix (optional) Special optimisation or domain
             | specialisation. -LongCtx, -Vision, -Code
             | 
             | Why this works * No ambiguous letters or numerics - "o3"
             | can be read as "03" or "oz"; avoid that entirely. * Self-
             | explanatory language - non-technical users recognise "Lite"
             | versus "Pro" instantly. * Scalable - new minor rev? bump
             | the generation (4.2). Need a cheaper size? add a Nano tier
             | without disturbing the rest.
             | 
             | [?]
             | 
             | 2. Applying it to your current list
             | 
             | Current name Proposed new name Rationale GPT-4o GPT-4
             | Standard Baseline flagship of the 4-series. o3 GPT-4 Lite
             | Same generation, lowest tier. o4-mini GPT-4 Lite+ (or GPT-4
             | Lite LongCtx if that's the point) Indicates "Lite" family
             | but a bit more capable; "+" or a suffix clarifies how.
             | o4-mini-high GPT-4 Standard LongCtx (or GPT-4 Lite Pro)
             | Pick one dimension: either it's still "Lite" but higher
             | context, or it has moved into "Standard". GPT-4.5 GPT-4.5
             | Standard Mid-cycle architectural upgrade, default tier.
             | GPT-4.1 GPT-4.1 Standard Ditto. GPT-4.1-mini GPT-4.1 Lite
             | Same generation, smaller/cheaper option.
             | 
             | [?]
             | 
             | 3. Quick style guide for future models 1. Stick to two
             | words (or two words + optional suffix) GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5
             | Lite-Vision - still readable at a glance. 2. Reserve extra
             | punctuation for special cases only Hyphens or the "+"
             | symbol should signal meaning, not be decorative. 3. Publish
             | a public matrix A small table in docs or the dashboard that
             | maps Generation x Tier - context length, cost, latency
             | eliminates guesswork.
             | 
             | [?]
             | 
             | One-line summary
             | 
             | GPT- [-Specialisation] keeps names short, descriptive and
             | future-proof--so even non-technical users can tell
             | instantly which model suits their needs. ```
        
           | aetherspawn wrote:
           | Came here to say this, the naming scheme is ridiculous and is
           | getting more impossible to follow each day.
           | 
           | For example the other day they released a supposedly better
           | model with a lower number..
        
             | aetherspawn wrote:
             | I'd honestly prefer they just have 3 personas of varying
             | cost/intelligence: Sam, Elmo and Einstein or something, and
             | then tack on the date, elmo-2025-1 and silently delete the
             | old ones.
        
           | dmos62 wrote:
           | If you obfuscate the naming, you obfuscate the value
           | proposition, and people become easier to mislead into
           | choosing an overly expensive model. Same as with Intel CPUs,
           | or many many other hardware products.
        
         | levocardia wrote:
         | There's a humorous version of Poe's law that says "any
         | sufficiently genuine attempt to explain the differences between
         | OpenAI's models is indistinguishable from parody"
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | > users that just want to get answers to their questions of
         | life
         | 
         | Those users go to chat.openai.com (or download the app), type
         | text in the box and click send.
        
         | AtlasBarfed wrote:
         | I'd like one to do my test use case:
         | 
         | Port unix-sed from c to java with a full test suite and all
         | options supported.
         | 
         | Somewhere between "it answers questions of life" and "it beats
         | PhDs at math questions", I'd like to see one LLM take this,
         | IMO, rather "pure" language task and succeeed.
         | 
         | It is complicated, but it isn't complex. It's string operations
         | with a deep but not that deep expression system and flag set.
         | 
         | It is well-described and documented on the internet, and
         | presumably training sets. It is succinctly described as a
         | problem that virtually all computer coders would understand
         | what it entailed if it were assigned to them. It is drudgerous,
         | showing the opportunity for LLMs to show how they would improve
         | true productivity.
         | 
         | GPT fails to do anything other than the most basic substitute
         | operations. Claude was only slightly better, but to its
         | detriment hallucinated massive amounts and made fake passing
         | test cases that didn't even test the code.
         | 
         | The reaction I get to this test is ambivalence, but IMO if LLMs
         | could help port entire software packages between languages with
         | similar feature sets (aside from Turing Completeness), then
         | software cross-use would explode, and maybe we could port
         | "vulnerable" code to "safe" Rust en masse.
         | 
         | I get it, it's not what they are chasing customer-wise. They
         | want to write (in n-gate terms) webcrap.
        
           | CamperBob2 wrote:
           | How does the latest Gemini 2.5 Pro Ultra Flash Max Hemi XLT
           | release do on that task? It obviously demands a massive
           | context window.
        
             | AtlasBarfed wrote:
             | I'll check once I get the nitrous tanks and the aftermarket
             | turbos overnighted from Japan arrive.
        
           | nipah wrote:
           | I have a very simple question with like, 5 lines at best,
           | that basically no model, neither reasoning or simpler could
           | grasp. For obvious reasons I'm not disclosing it here
           | (because I fear data contamination in the long run), but it
           | basically breaks the "reasoning" of those things.
           | Unfortunately, I still can't try the o3-pro because the API
           | version is not easily available, and I'm certainly not
           | willing to pay for it in pro mode, but when it comes to the
           | plus version (if it comes) I'll try. To this date, because of
           | this question (and similar ones) I stand very unimpressed
           | with those models, the marketing is a thousand times larger
           | than reality, and I suspect people in general are
           | surprisingly less capable of detecting intelligence than they
           | think.
           | 
           | The normal o3 also managed to break 3 isolated installations
           | of linux I was trying it with, a few days ago. The task was
           | very simple, simply setup ubuntu with btrfs, timeshift and
           | grub-btrfs and it managed to fail every single time (even
           | when searching the web), so it was not impressive either.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | The massive real market here is enterprises that need to
           | rewrite legacy code to modern platforms, retaining the
           | business logic as-is but modernising the _style_.
           | 
           | .NET Framework 4.x to .NET 10, Python 2 to 3, Java 8 to
           | <current version>, etc...
           | 
           | The advantage the LLMs have here is that staying within the
           | same programming language and its paradigm is dramatically
           | simpler than converting a "procedural" language like C to an
           | object-oriented language like Java that has a wildly
           | different standard library.
        
         | resters wrote:
         | Models are used for actual tasks where predictable behavior is
         | a benefit. Models are also used on cutting-edge tasks where
         | smarter/better outputs are highly valued. Some applications
         | value speed and so a new, smaller/cheaper model can be just
         | right.
         | 
         | I think the naming scheme is just fine and is very
         | straightforward to anyone who pays the slightest bit of
         | attention.
        
       | manmal wrote:
       | The benchmarks don't look _that_ much better than o3. Does that
       | mean Pro models are just incrementally better than base models,
       | or are we approaching the higher end of a sigmoid function, with
       | performance gains leveling off?
        
         | bachittle wrote:
         | it's the same model as o3, just with thinking tokens turned up
         | to the max.
        
           | Tiberium wrote:
           | That's simply not true, it's not just "max thinking budget
           | o3" just like o1-pro wasn't "max thinking budget o1". The
           | specifics are unknown, but they might be doing multiple model
           | generations and then somehow picking the best answer each
           | time? Of course that's a gross simplification, but some
           | assume that they do it this way.
        
             | cdblades wrote:
             | > That's simply not true, it's not just "max thinking
             | budget o3"
             | 
             | > The specifics are unknown, but they might...
             | 
             | Hold up.
             | 
             | > but some assume that they do it this way.
             | 
             | Come on now.
        
               | MallocVoidstar wrote:
               | Good luck finding the tweet (I can't) but at least one
               | OpenAI engineer has said that o1-pro was _not_ just  'o1
               | thinking longer'.
        
               | boole1854 wrote:
               | I also don't have that tweet saved, but I do remember it.
        
               | PhilippGille wrote:
               | This one? Found with Kagi Assistant.
               | 
               | https://x.com/michpokrass/status/1869102222598152627
               | 
               | It says:
               | 
               | > hey aidan, not a miscommunication, they are different
               | products! o1 pro is a different implementation and not
               | just o1 with high reasoning.
        
               | cdblades wrote:
               | That's a rather crappy product naming scheme.
        
             | firejake308 wrote:
             | > "We also introduced OpenAI o3-pro in the API--a version
             | of o3 that uses more compute to think harder and provide
             | reliable answers to challenging problems"
             | 
             | Sounds like it is just o3 with higher thinking budget to me
        
         | dyauspitr wrote:
         | Don't they have a full fledged version of o4 somewhere
         | internally at this point?
        
           | ankit219 wrote:
           | They do it seems. o1 and o3 were based on the same base
           | model. o4 is going to be based on a newer (and perhaps
           | smarter) base model.
        
         | lhl wrote:
         | I've been using o3 extensively since release (and a lot of Deep
         | Research). I also use a lot of Claude and Gemini 2.5 Pro (most
         | of the times, for code I'll let all of them go at it and
         | iterate on my fav results).
         | 
         | So far I've only used o3-pro a bit today, and it's a bit too
         | heavy to use interactively (fire it off, revisit in 10-15
         | minutes), but it seems to generate much cleaner/more well
         | organized code and answers.
         | 
         | I feel like the benchmarks aren't really doing a good job at
         | capturing/reflecting capabilities atm. eg, while Claude 4
         | Sonnet appears to score about as well as Opus 4, in my usage
         | Opus is _always_ significantly better at solving my problem
         | /writing the code I need.
         | 
         | Besides especially complex/gnarly problems, I feel like a lot
         | of the different models are all good enough and it comes down
         | to reliability. For example, I've stopped using Claude for work
         | basically because multiple times now it's completely eaten my
         | prompts and even artifacts it's generated. Also, it hits limits
         | ridiculously fast (and does so even when on network/resource
         | failures).
         | 
         | I use 4.1 as my workhorse for code interpreter work (creating
         | graphs/charts w/ matplotlib, basic df stuff, converting tables
         | to markdown) as it's just better integrated than the others and
         | so far I haven't caught 4.1 transposing/having errors with
         | numbers (which I've noticed w/ 4o and Sonnet).
         | 
         | Having tested most of the leading edge open and closed models a
         | fair amount, 4.5 is still my current preferred model to
         | actually _talk_ to /make judgement calls (particularly with
         | translations). Again, not reflected in benchmarks, but 4.5 is
         | the only model that gives me the feeling I had when first
         | talking to Opus 3 (eg, of actual fluid intelligence, and a
         | pleasant personality that isn't overly sychophantic) - Opus 4
         | is a huge regression in that respect for me.
         | 
         | (I also use Codex, Roo Code, Windsurf, and a few other API-
         | based tools, but tbt, OpenAI's ChatGPT UI is generally better
         | for how I leverage the models in my workflow.)
        
           | manmal wrote:
           | Thanks for your input, very appreciated. Just in case you
           | didn't mean Claude Code, it's really good in my experience
           | and mostly stable. If something fails, it just retries and I
           | don't notice it much. Its autonomous discovery and tool use
           | is really good and I'm relying more and more on it.
        
             | lhl wrote:
             | For the Claude issues, I'm referring to the claude.ai
             | frontend. While I use some Codex, Aider, and other agentic
             | tools, I found Claude Code to be not to my taste - for my
             | uses it tended burn _a lot_ of tokens and gave relatively
             | mediocre results, but I know it works well for others, so
             | YMMV.
        
               | mwigdahl wrote:
               | If you're happy with your current tools that's good, but
               | if not, and if you haven't tried Claude Code recently,
               | you might give it a retry. I'm not sure what all they've
               | been changing, but it burns a lot fewer tokens for me on
               | tasks now than it did when I first started using it, with
               | better results.
        
           | petesergeant wrote:
           | I wonder if we'll start to see artisanal benchmarks. You --
           | and I -- have preferred models for certain tasks. There's a
           | world in which we start to see how things score on the
           | "simonw chattiness index", and come to rely on smaller more
           | specific benchmarks I think
        
             | lhl wrote:
             | Yeah, I think personalized evals will definitely be a
             | thing. Besides reviewing way too much Arena, WildChat and
             | having now seen lots of live traces firsthand, there's a
             | wide range of LLM usage (and preferences), which really
             | don't match my own tastes or requirements, lol.
             | 
             | For the past year or two, I've had my own personal 25
             | question vibe-check I've used on new models to kick the
             | tires, but I think the future is something both a little
             | more rigorous and a little more automated (something like
             | LLM Jury w/ an UltraFeedback criteria based off of your own
             | real world exchanges and then BTL ranked)? A future
             | project...
        
             | HDThoreaun wrote:
             | I think its more likely that we move away from benchmarks
             | and towards more of a traditional reviewer model. People
             | will find LLM influencers whose takes they agree with and
             | follow them to keep up with new models.
        
         | petesergeant wrote:
         | I am starting to feel like hallucination is a fundamentally
         | unsolvable problem with the current architecture, and is going
         | to keep squeezing the benchmarks until something changes.
         | 
         | At this point I don't need smarter general models for my work,
         | I need models that don't hallucinate, that are faster/cheaper,
         | and that have better taste in specific domains. I think that's
         | where we're going to see improvements moving forward.
        
           | OccamsMirror wrote:
           | If you could actually teach these models things, not just in
           | the current context, but as temporal learning, then that
           | would alleviate a lot of the issues of hallucination. I
           | imagine being able to say "that method doesn't exist, don't
           | recommend it again" and then give it the documentation and it
           | would absorb that information permanently, that would
           | fundamentally change how we interact with these models. But
           | can that work for models hosted for everyone to use at once?
        
             | petesergeant wrote:
             | There are an almost infinite number of things that can be
             | hallucinated, though. You can't maintain a list of
             | scientific papers or legal cases that don't exist!
             | Hallucinations (almost certainly) aren't specific
             | falsehoods that need to be erased...
        
               | jsjohnst wrote:
               | The level of hallucinations with o3 are no different than
               | the level of hallucinations from most (all?) human
               | sources in my experience. Yes, you definitely need to
               | cross check, but yes, you need to do that for literally
               | everything else, so it feels a bit redundant to keep
               | preaching that as if it's a failing of the model and not
               | just an inherent property of all free sharing of
               | information between two parties.
        
           | varjag wrote:
           | Hallucination rate from o3 onward appear to be very low, to
           | the point I rarely have to check.
        
             | petesergeant wrote:
             | This doesn't match my experience, so if I were you I'd
             | absolutely keep checking.
        
       | tiahura wrote:
       | So, upgrade to Teams and pay the $50? Plus more usage of o3.
       | Seems like it might be a shot at the $100 claude max?
        
         | dog436zkj3p7 wrote:
         | What do you mean with "pay the $50"?
         | 
         | Also, does anybody know what limits o3-pro has under the team
         | plan? I don't see it available in the model picker at all (on
         | team).
        
           | sanex wrote:
           | I believe teams is $25/user with a 2 user minimum.
        
             | dog436zkj3p7 wrote:
             | Ah, thanks for explaining!
        
       | carmelion wrote:
       | Jl App
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%_
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44239359
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | here's a nice user review we published:
       | https://www.latent.space/p/o3-pro
       | 
       | sama's highlight[0]:
       | 
       | > "The plan o3 gave us was plausible, reasonable; but the plan o3
       | Pro gave us was specific and rooted enough that it actually
       | changed how we are thinking about our future."
       | 
       | I kept nudging the team to go the whole way to just let o3 be
       | their CEO but they didn't bite yet haha
       | 
       | 0: https://x.com/sama/status/1932533208366608568
        
         | tomComb wrote:
         | Big fan swyx, but both here and in the article there is some
         | bragging about being quoted by sama, and while I acknowledge
         | that that's not out of the ordinary, I'm concerned about where
         | it leads: what it takes to get quoted by sama (or similar
         | interested party) is saying something good about his product,
         | and having a decent follower count.
         | 
         | Dangerous incentives IMO.
        
           | swyx wrote:
           | acked. in my defense i didnt write the article + ben already
           | had a good track record from the o1 article. while our
           | relationship with oai is v v v impt to us, we've also covered
           | negative openai stories: https://www.latent.space/p/clippy-v-
           | anton and will continue to give balanced coverage with the
           | other labs when they do well.
           | 
           | we are definitely not seeking to be openai sycophants, nor
           | would they want us to be.
        
         | alightsoul wrote:
         | if o3 is so good why aren't they using it to replace
         | management?
        
           | martin_corredor wrote:
           | It's been 1 day
           | 
           | The technology needs to diffuse through and find its
           | equilibrium within the market
           | 
           | You could say 3.5/3.7 Sonnet was good enough to replace some
           | juniors but the juniors didn't get replaced immediately - it
           | has a lag in time for it to ripple through
        
       | WhitneyLand wrote:
       | So, we currently have o4-mini and o4-mini-high, which represent
       | medium and high usage of "thinking" or use of reasoning tokens.
       | 
       | This announcement adds o3-pro, which pairs with o3 in the same
       | way the o4 models go together.
       | 
       | It should be called o3-high, but to align with the $200 pro
       | membership it's called pro instead.
       | 
       | That said o3 is already an incredibly powerful model. I prefer it
       | over the new Anthropic 4 models and Gemini 2.5. It's raw power
       | seems similar to those others, but it's so good at inline tool
       | use it usually comes out ahead overall.
       | 
       | Any non-trivial code generation/editing should be using an
       | advanced reasoning model, or else you're losing time fixing more
       | glitches or missing out on better quality solutions.
       | 
       | Of course the caveat is cost, but there's value on the frontier.
        
         | boole1854 wrote:
         | No, this doesn't seem to be correct, although confusion
         | regarding model names is understandable.
         | 
         | o4-mini-high is the label on chatgpt.com for what in the API is
         | called o4-mini with reasoning={"effort": "high"}. Whereas
         | o4-mini on chatgpt.com is the same thing as
         | reasoning={"effort": "medium"} in the API.
         | 
         | o3 can also be run via the API with reasoning={"effort":
         | "high"}.
         | 
         | o3-pro is _different_ than o3 with high reasoning. It has a
         | separate endpoint, and it runs for much longer.
         | 
         | See https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/reasoning?api-
         | mode=r...
        
           | johnecheck wrote:
           | OpenAI started strong in the naming department (ChatGPT,
           | DALL-E) then fell off _so_ hard since.
        
             | x187463 wrote:
             | It's arguable ChatGPT is not such a great name, either. The
             | general public has no idea what GPT means and will often
             | swap the letters around. It does benefit from being unique,
             | however.
        
       | chad1n wrote:
       | The guys in the other thread who said that OpenAI might have
       | quantized o3 and that's how they reduced the price might be
       | right. This o3-pro might be the actual o3-preview from the
       | beginning and the o3 might be just a quantized version. I wish
       | someone benchmarks all of these models to check for drops in
       | quality.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | That's definitely not the case here. The new o3-pro is _slow_ -
         | it took two minutes just to draw me an SVG of a pelican riding
         | a bicycle. o3-preview was much faster than that.
         | 
         | https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/10/o3-pro/
        
           | k2xl wrote:
           | Not distilled, same model. https://x.com/therealadamg/status/
           | 1932534244774957121?s=46&t...
        
           | CamperBob2 wrote:
           | Would you say this is the best cycling pelican to date? I
           | don't remember any of the others looking better than this.
           | 
           | Of course by now it'll be in-distribution. Time for a new
           | benchmark...
        
             | jstummbillig wrote:
             | I love that we are in the timeline where we are somewhat
             | seriously evaluating probably super human intelligence by
             | their ability to draw a svg of a cycling pelican.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | I still remember my jaw hitting the floor when the first
               | DALL-E paper came out, with the baby daikon radish
               | walking a dog. How the actual _fuck_...? Now we 're
               | probably all too jaded to fully appreciate the next
               | advance of that magnitude, whatever that turns out to be.
               | 
               | E.g., the pelicans all look pretty cruddy including this
               | one, but the fact that they are being delivered in .SVG
               | is a bigger deal than the quality of the artwork itself,
               | IMHO. This isn't a diffusion model, it's an
               | autoregressive transformer imitating one. The wonder
               | isn't that it's done badly, it's that it's happening at
               | all.
        
               | datameta wrote:
               | This makes me think of a reduction gear as a metaphor. At
               | a high enough ratio, the torque is enormous but being put
               | toward barely perceptible movement. There is the huge
               | amount of computation happening to result in SVG that
               | resembles a pelican on a bicycle.
        
               | cdblades wrote:
               | I _don 't_ love that this is the conversation and when
               | these models bake-in these silly scenarios with training
               | data, everyone goes "see, pelican bike! super human
               | intelligence!"
               | 
               | The point is never the pelican. The point is that if a
               | thing has information about pelicans, and has information
               | about bicycles, then why can't it combine those ideas? Is
               | it because it's not intelligent?
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | "I'm taking this talking dog right back to the pound. It
               | told me to go long on AAPL. Totally overhyped"
        
               | johnmaguire wrote:
               | Just because it's impressive doesn't mean it has "super
               | human intelligence" though.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | Well, it certainly came up with a better-looking SVG
               | pelican than _this_ human could have.
        
             | simonw wrote:
             | I like the Gemini 2.5 Pro ones a little more:
             | https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-
             | llms/#ai-...
        
           | AstroBen wrote:
           | That's one good looking pelican
        
           | FergusArgyll wrote:
           | Wow! pelican benchmark is now saturated
        
             | esperent wrote:
             | Not until I can count the feathers, ask for a front view of
             | the same pelican, then ask for it to be animated, all still
             | using SVG.
        
             | dtech wrote:
             | I wonder how much of that is because it's getting more and
             | more included in training data.
             | 
             | We now need to start using walrusses riding rickshaws
        
           | Terretta wrote:
           | > _It 's only available via the newer Responses API_
           | 
           | And in ChatGPT Pro.
        
           | teruakohatu wrote:
           | Do you think a cycling pelican is still a valid cursory
           | benchmark? By now surely discussions about it are in the
           | training set.
           | 
           | There is quite a few on Google Image search.
           | 
           | On the other hand they still seem to struggle!
        
           | eru wrote:
           | Well, that might be more of a function of how long they let
           | it 'reason' than anything intrinsic to the model?
        
           | torginus wrote:
           | This made me think of the 'draw a bike experiment', where
           | people were asked to draw a bike from memory, and were
           | suprisingly bad at recreating how the parts fit together in a
           | sensible manner:
           | 
           | https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-
           | you-...
           | 
           | ChatGPT seems to perform better than most, but with notable
           | missing elements (where's the chain or the handlebars?). I'm
           | not sure if those are due to a lack of understanding, or
           | artistic liberties taken by the model?
        
         | gkamradt wrote:
         | o3-pro is not the same as the o3-preview that was shown in Dec
         | '24. OpenAI confirmed this for us. More on that here:
         | https://x.com/arcprize/status/1932535380865347585
        
         | weinzierl wrote:
         | Is there a way to figure out likely quantization from the
         | output. I mean, does quantization degrade output quality in
         | certain ways that are different from other modification of
         | other model properties (e.g. size or distillation)?
        
         | hapticmonkey wrote:
         | What a great future we are building. If AI is supposed to run
         | everything, everywhere....then there will be 2, maybe 3, AI
         | companies. And nobody outside those companies knows how they
         | work.
        
           | jsjohnst wrote:
           | > And nobody outside those companies knows how they work.
           | 
           | I think you meant to say:
           | 
           | And nobody knows how they work.
        
         | torginus wrote:
         | I've wondered if some kind of smart pruning is possible during
         | evaluation.
         | 
         | What I mean by that, is if a neuron implements a sigmoid
         | function and its input weights are 10,1,2,3 that means if the
         | first input is active, then evaluation the other ones is
         | mathematically pointless, since it doesn't change the result,
         | which recursively means the inputs of those neurons that
         | contribute to the precursors are pointless as well.
         | 
         | I have no idea how feasible or practical is it to implement
         | such an optimization and full network scale, but I think its
         | interesting to think about
        
       | DanMcInerney wrote:
       | I'm really hoping GPT5 is a larger jump in metrics than the last
       | several releases we've seen like Claude3.5 - Claude4 or o3-mini-
       | high to o3-pro. Although I will preface that with the fact I've
       | been building agents for about a year now and despite the
       | benchmarks only showing slight improvement, I have seen that each
       | new generation feels actively better at exactly the same tasks I
       | gave the previous generation.
       | 
       | It would be interesting if there was a model that was
       | specifically trained on task-oriented data. It's my understanding
       | they're trained on all data available, but I wonder if it can be
       | fine-tuned or given some kind of reinforcement learning on
       | breaking down general tasks to specific implementations.
       | Essentially an agent-specific model.
        
         | codingwagie wrote:
         | I'm seeing big advances that arent shown in the benchmarks, I
         | can simply build software now that I couldnt build before. The
         | level of complexity that I can manage and deliver is higher.
        
           | shmoogy wrote:
           | Yeah I kind of feel like I'm not moving as fast as I did,
           | because the complexity and features grow - constant scope
           | creep due to moving faster.
        
           | alightsoul wrote:
           | mind telling examples?
        
             | motorest wrote:
             | Not OP, but a couple of days ago I managed to vibecode my
             | way through a small app that pulled data from a few
             | services and did a few validation checks. By itself its not
             | very impressive, but my input was literally "this is how
             | the responses from endpoint A,B and C look like. This field
             | included somewhere in A must be somewhere in the response
             | from B, and the response from C must feature this and that
             | from response A and B. If the responses include links,
             | check that they exist". To my surprise, it generated
             | everything in one go. No retry nor Agent mode churn needed.
             | In the not so distant past this would require progressing
             | through smaller steps, and I had to fill in tests to nudge
             | Agent mode to not mess up. Not today.
        
               | alightsoul wrote:
               | what tools did you use?
        
               | motorest wrote:
               | > what tools did you use?
               | 
               | Nothing fancy. Visual Studio Code + Copilot, agent mode,
               | a couple prompt files, and that's it.
        
               | munksbeer wrote:
               | Do you mind me asking which language and if you have any
               | esoteric constraints in the apps you build? We use a java
               | in a monorepo, and have a full custom rolled framework on
               | top of which we build our apps. Do you find vibe coding
               | works ok with those sort of constraints, or do you just
               | end up with a generic app?
        
               | corysama wrote:
               | I'm wrapping up doing literally the same thing. I did it
               | step-by-step. But, for me there was also a process of
               | figuring out how it should work.
        
           | IanCal wrote:
           | A really important thing is the distinction between
           | _performance_ and _utility_.
           | 
           | Performance can improve linearly and utility can be massively
           | jumpy. For some people/tasks performance can have improved
           | but it'll have been "interesting but pointless" until it hits
           | some threshold and then suddenly you can do things with it.
        
           | protocolture wrote:
           | I am finding that my ability to use it to code, aligns almost
           | perfectly with increasing token memory.
        
           | kevinqi wrote:
           | yeah, the benchmarks are just a proxy. o3 was a step change
           | where I started to really be able to build stuff I couldn't
           | before
        
           | iLoveOncall wrote:
           | Okay but this has all to do with the tooling and nothing to
           | do with the models.
        
             | mofeien wrote:
             | Can you explain why?
        
               | iLoveOncall wrote:
               | You can write projects with LLMs thanks to tools that can
               | analyze your local project's context, which didn't exist
               | a year ago.
               | 
               | You could use Cursor, Windsurf, Q CLI, Claude Code,
               | whatever else with Claude 3 or even an older model and
               | you'd still get usable results.
               | 
               | It's not the models which have enabled "vibe coding",
               | it's the tools.
               | 
               | An additional proof of that is that the new models focus
               | more and more on coding in their releases, and other
               | fields have not benefited at all from the supposed model
               | improvements. That wouldn't be the case if improvements
               | were really due to the models and not the tooling.
        
               | eru wrote:
               | You need a certain quality of model to make 'vibe coding'
               | work. For example, I think even with the best tooling in
               | the world, you'd be hard pressed to make GPT 2 useful for
               | vibe coding.
        
               | iLoveOncall wrote:
               | I'm not claiming otherwise. I'm just saying that people
               | say "look what we can do with the new models" when
               | they're completely ignoring the fact that the tooling has
               | improved a hundred fold (or rather, there was no tooling
               | at all and now there is).
        
               | eru wrote:
               | OK, no objections from me there.
        
               | signatoremo wrote:
               | That contradicts what you said earlier -- "this has all
               | to do with the tooling and nothing to do with the
               | models".
        
               | iLoveOncall wrote:
               | Clearly nobody is talking about GPT-2 here, but I posit
               | that you would have a perfectly reasonable "vibe coding"
               | experience with models like the initial ChatGPT one,
               | provided you have all the tools we have today.
        
               | broast wrote:
               | Chatgpt itself has gotten much better at producing and
               | reading code since a year ago, in my experience
        
             | efunnekol wrote:
             | I mostly disagree with this.
             | 
             | I have been using 'aider' as my go to coding tool for over
             | a year. It basically works the same way that it always has:
             | you specify all the context and give it a request and that
             | goes to the model without much massaging.
             | 
             | I can see a massive improvement in results with each new
             | model that arrives. I can do so much more with Gemini 2.5
             | or Claude 4 than I could do with earlier models and the
             | tool has not really changed at all.
             | 
             | I will agree that for the casual user, the tools make a big
             | difference. But if you took the tool of today and paired it
             | with a model from last year, it would go in circles
        
         | energy123 wrote:
         | That would require AIME 2024 going above 100%.
         | 
         | There was always going to be diminishing returns in these
         | benchmarks. It's by construction. It's mathematically
         | impossible for that not to happen. But it doesn't mean the
         | models are getting better at a slower pace.
         | 
         | Benchmark space is just a proxy for what we care about, but
         | don't confuse it for the actual destination.
         | 
         | If you want, you can choose to look at a different set of
         | benchmarks like ARC-AGI-2 or Epoch and observe greater than
         | linear improvements, and forget that these easier benchmarks
         | exist.
        
           | croddin wrote:
           | There is still plenty of room for growth on the ARC-AGI
           | benchmarks. ARC-AGI 2 is still <5% for o3-pro and ARC-AGI 1
           | is only at 59% for o3-pro-high:
           | 
           | "ARC-AGI-1: * Low: 44%, $1.64/task * Medium: 57%, $3.18/task
           | * High: 59%, $4.16/task
           | 
           | ARC-AGI-2: * All reasoning efforts: <5%, $4-7/task
           | 
           | Takeaways: * o3-pro in line with o3 performance * o3's new
           | price sets the ARC-AGI-1 Frontier"
           | 
           | - https://x.com/arcprize/status/1932535378080395332
        
             | saberience wrote:
             | I'm not sure the arcagi are interesting benchmarks, for one
             | they are image based and for two most people I show them
             | too have issues understanding them, and in fact I had
             | issues understanding them.
             | 
             | Given the models don't even see the versions we get to see
             | it doesn't surprise me they have issues we these. It's not
             | hard to make benchmarks that are so hard that humans and
             | Lims can't do.
        
               | HDThoreaun wrote:
               | arc agi is the closest any widely used benchmark is
               | coming to an IQ test, its straight logic/reasoning.
               | Looking at the problem set its hard for me to choose a
               | better benchmark for "when this is better than humans we
               | have agi"
        
               | saberience wrote:
               | There are humans who cannot do arc agi though so how does
               | an LLM not doing it mean that LLMs don't have general
               | intelligence?
               | 
               | LLMs have obviously reached the point where they are
               | smarter than almost every person alive, better at maths,
               | physics, biology, English, foreign languages, etc.
               | 
               | But because they can't solve this honestly weird
               | visual/spatial reasoning test they aren't intelligent?
               | 
               | That must mean most humans on this planet aren't
               | generally intelligent too.
        
               | HDThoreaun wrote:
               | > LLMs have obviously reached the point where they are
               | smarter than almost every person alive, better at maths,
               | physics, biology, English, foreign languages, etc.
               | 
               | I dont think memorizing stuff is the same as being smart.
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
               | 
               | > But because they can't solve this honestly weird
               | visual/spatial reasoning test they aren't intelligent?
               | 
               | Yes. Being intelligent is about recognizing patterns and
               | thats what arc agi tests. It tests ability to learn. A
               | lot of people are not very smart.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | > I dont think memorizing stuff is the same as being
               | smart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
               | 
               | I agree. The problem I have with the Chinese Room thought
               | experiment is: just as the human who mechanically reading
               | books to answer questions they don't understands does not
               | themselves know Chinese, likewise no neuron in the human
               | brain knows how the brain works.
               | 
               | The intelligence, such as it is, is found in the process
               | that generated the structure -- of the translation books
               | in the Chinese room, of the connectome in our brains, and
               | of the weights in an LLM.
               | 
               | What comes out of that process is an artefact of
               | intelligence, and that artefact can translate Chinese or
               | whatever.
               | 
               | Because all current AI take a _huge_ number of examples
               | to learn anything, I think it 's fair to say they're not
               | particularly intelligent -- but likewise, they can to an
               | extent make up for being stupid by being stupid very very
               | quickly.
               | 
               | But: this definition of intelligence doesn't really fit
               | "can solve novel puzzle", as there's a lot of room for
               | getting good at that my memorising lot of things that
               | puzzle-creators tend to do.
               | 
               | And any mind (biological or synthetic) _must_ learn
               | patterns before getting started: the problem of
               | induction* is that no finite number of examples is ever
               | guaranteed to be sufficient to predict the next item in a
               | sequence, there is _always_ an infinite set of other
               | possible solutions in general (though in reality bounded
               | by 2^n, where n = the number of bits required to express
               | the universe in any given state).
               | 
               | I suspect, but cannot prove, that biological intelligence
               | learns from fewer examples for a related reason, that our
               | brains have been given a bias by evolution towards
               | certain priors from which "common sense" answers tend to
               | follow. And "common sense" is often wrong, c.f.
               | Aristotelian physics (never mind Newtonian) instead of
               | QM/GR.
               | 
               | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
        
               | nipah wrote:
               | "most people I show them too have issues understanding
               | them, and in fact I had issues understanding them" ???
               | those benchmarks are so extremely simple they have
               | basically 100% human approval rates, unless you are
               | saying "I could not grasp it immediately but later I was
               | able to after understanding the point" I think you and
               | your friends should see a neurologist. And I'm not
               | mocking you, I mean seriously, those are tasks extremely
               | basic for any human brain and even some other mammals to
               | do.
        
               | clbrmbr wrote:
               | You may be above average intelligence. Those challenges
               | are like classic IQ tests and I bet have a significant
               | distribution among humans.
        
               | achierius wrote:
               | No, they've done testing against samples from the general
               | population.
        
               | yorwba wrote:
               | The ARC-AGI-2 paper
               | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11831#figure.4 uses a non-
               | representative sample, success rate differs widely across
               | participants and "final ARC-AGI-2 test pairs were solved,
               | on average, by 75% of people who attempted them. The
               | average test-taker solved 66% of tasks they attempted.
               | 100% of ARC-AGI-2 tasks were solved by at least two
               | people (many were solved by more) in two attempts or
               | less."
               | 
               | Certainly those non-representative humans are much better
               | than current models, but they're also far from scoring
               | 100%.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | The original ARC-AGI test was much easier than the recent
               | v2.
        
               | saberience wrote:
               | lol 100% approval rates? No they don't.
               | 
               | Also mammals? What mammals could even understand we were
               | giving it a test?
               | 
               | Have you seen them or shown them to average people? I'm
               | sure the people who write them understand them but if you
               | show these problems to average people in the street they
               | are completely clueless.
               | 
               | This is a classic case of some phd ai guys making a
               | benchmark and not really considering what average people
               | are capable of.
               | 
               | Look, these insanely capable ai systems can't do these
               | problems but the boys in the lab can do them, what a good
               | benchmark.
        
               | nipah wrote:
               | quoting my own previous response: > Also, I mentioned
               | mammals because those problems are of an order that
               | mammals and even other animals would need to solve in
               | reality for a diversity of cases. I'm not saying that
               | they would literally be able to take the test and solve
               | it, nor to understand this is a test, but that they would
               | need to solve problems of similar nature in reality.
               | Naturally this point has it's own limits, but it's not
               | easily discarded as you tried to do.
               | 
               | ---
               | 
               | > Have you seen them or shown them to average people? I'm
               | sure the people who write them understand them but if you
               | show these problems to average people in the street they
               | are completely clueless.
               | 
               | I can show them to people on my family, I'll do it today
               | and come back with the answer, it's the best way of
               | testing that out.
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | > so extremely simple they have basically 100% human
               | approval rates
               | 
               | Are you thinking of a different set? Arc-agi-2 has
               | average 60% success for a single person and questions
               | require only 2 out of 9 correct answers to be accepted. h
               | ttps://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hQrGh5YI6MK3PalQYS
               | Qs...
               | 
               | > and even some other mammals to do.
               | 
               | No, that's not the case.
        
               | nipah wrote:
               | No, I think I saw the graphs on someone's channel, but
               | maybe I misinterpreted the results. But to be fair, my
               | point never depended on 100% of the participants being
               | right 100% of the questions, there are innumerous factors
               | that could affect your performance on those tests,
               | including the pressure. The AI also had access to lenient
               | conventions, so it should be "fair" in this sense.
               | 
               | Either way, there's something fishy about this
               | presentation, it says: "ARC-AGI-1 WAS EASILY BRUTE-
               | FORCIBLE", but when o3 initially "solved" most of it the
               | co-founder or ARC-PRIZE said: "Despite the significant
               | cost per task, these numbers aren't just the result of
               | applying brute force compute to the benchmark. OpenAI's
               | new o3 model represents a significant leap forward in
               | AI's ability to adapt to novel tasks. This is not merely
               | incremental improvement, but a genuine breakthrough,
               | marking a qualitative shift in AI capabilities compared
               | to the prior limitations of LLMs. o3 is a system capable
               | of adapting to tasks it has never encountered before,
               | arguably approaching human-level performance in the ARC-
               | AGI domain.", he was saying confidently that it would not
               | be a result of brute-forcing the problems. And it was not
               | the first time, "ARC-AGI-1 consists of 800 puzzle-like
               | tasks, designed as grid-based visual reasoning problems.
               | These tasks, trivial for humans but challenging for
               | machines, typically provide only a small number of
               | example input-output pairs (usually around three). This
               | requires the test taker (human or AI) to deduce
               | underlying rules through abstraction, inference, and
               | prior knowledge rather than brute-force or extensive
               | training."
               | 
               | Now they are saying ARC-AGI-2 is not bruteforcible, what
               | is happening there? They didn't provided any reasoning
               | for why one was bruteforcible and the other not, nor how
               | they are so sure about that. They "recognized" that it
               | could be brute-forced before, but in a way less
               | expressive manner, by explicitly stating it would need
               | "unlimited resources and time" to solve. And they are
               | using the non-bruteforceability in this presentation as a
               | point for it.
               | 
               | --- Also, I mentioned mammals because those problems are
               | of an order that mammals and even other animals would
               | need to solve in reality for a diversity of cases. I'm
               | not saying that they would literally be able to take the
               | test and solve it, nor to understand this is a test, but
               | that they would need to solve problems of similar nature
               | in reality. Naturally this point has it's own limits, but
               | it's not easily discarded as you tried to do.
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | > my point never depended on 100% of the participants
               | being right 100% of the questions
               | 
               | You told someone that their reasoning is so bad they
               | should get checked by a doctor. Because they didn't find
               | the test easy, even though it averages 60% score per
               | person. You've been a dick to them while significantly
               | misrepresenting the numbers - just stop digging.
        
               | nipah wrote:
               | The second test scores 60%, the first was way higher. And
               | I specifically said ""unless you are saying "I could not
               | grasp it immediately but later I was able to after
               | understanding the point" I think you and your friends
               | should see a neurologist"", to which this person did not
               | responded. I saw the tests, solved some, I suspect the
               | variability here is more a question of methodology than
               | an inherent problem for those people. I also never stated
               | that my point depended on those people scoring 100%
               | specifically on the tests, even if it is in fact
               | extremely easy (and it is, the objective of this test is
               | to literally make tests that most humans could easily
               | beat but that would be hard for an AI) variability will
               | still exist and people with different perceptions would
               | skew the results, this is expected. "Significantly
               | misrepresenting the numbers" is also a stretch, I only
               | mentioned the numbers ONE time in my point, most of it
               | was about that inherent nature (or at least, the intended
               | nature) of the tests.
               | 
               | So on the edge, if he was not able to understand them at
               | all, and this was not just a problem of grasping the
               | problem, my point was that this would possibly indicate a
               | neurological problem, or developmental, due to the nature
               | of them. It's not a question of "you need to get all of
               | them right", his point was that he was unable to
               | understand them at all, that it confused them to an
               | understanding level.
        
         | jstummbillig wrote:
         | It's hard to be 100% certain, but I am 90% certain that the
         | benchmarks leveling off, at this point, should tell us that we
         | are really quite dumb and simply not good very good at either
         | using or evaluating the technology (yet?).
        
           | alightsoul wrote:
           | either that or the improvements aren't as large as before.
        
           | motorest wrote:
           | > (...) at this point, should tell us that we are really
           | quite dumb and simply not good very good at either using or
           | evaluating the technology (yet?).
           | 
           | I don't know about that. I think it's mainly because nowadays
           | LLMs can output very inconsistent results. In some
           | applications they can generate surprisingly good code, but
           | during the same session they can also do missteps and shit
           | the bed while following a prompt to small changes. For
           | example, sometimes I still get prompt responses that outright
           | delete critical code. I'm talking about things like asking
           | "extract this section of your helper method into a new
           | methid" and in response the LLM deletes the app's main
           | function. This doesn't happen all the time, or even in the
           | same session for the same command. How does one verify these
           | things?
        
         | XCSme wrote:
         | I remember the saying that from 90% to 99% is a 10x increase in
         | accuracy, but 99% to 99.999% is a 1000x increase in accuracy.
         | 
         | Even though it's a large10% increase first then only a 0.999%
         | increase.
        
           | jsjohnst wrote:
           | The saying goes:
           | 
           | From 90% to 99% is a 10x reduction in error rate, but 99% to
           | 99.999% is a 1000x decrease in error rates.
        
           | zmgsabst wrote:
           | Sometimes it's nice to frame it the other way, eg:
           | 
           | 90% -> 1 error per 10
           | 
           | 99% -> 1 error per 100
           | 
           | 99.99% -> 1 error per 10,000
           | 
           | That can help to see the growth in accuracy, when the numbers
           | start getting small (and why clocks are framed as 1 second
           | lost per...).
        
             | XCSme wrote:
             | Still, for the human mind it doesn't make intuitive sense.
             | 
             | I guess it's the same problem with the mind not intuitively
             | grasping the concept of exponential growth and how fast it
             | grows.
        
               | XCSme wrote:
               | ChatGPT quick explanation:
               | 
               | Humans struggle with understanding exponential growth due
               | to a cognitive bias known as *Exponential Growth Bias
               | (EGB)*--the tendency to underestimate how quickly
               | quantities grow over time. Studies like Wagenaar &
               | Timmers (1979) and Stango & Zinman (2009) show that even
               | educated individuals often misjudge scenarios involving
               | doubling, such as compound interest or viral spread. This
               | is because our brains are wired to think linearly, not
               | exponentially, a mismatch rooted in evolutionary
               | pressures where linear approximations were sufficient for
               | survival.
               | 
               | Further research by Tversky & Kahneman (1974) explains
               | that people rely on mental shortcuts (heuristics) when
               | dealing with complex concepts. These heuristics simplify
               | thinking but often lead to systematic errors, especially
               | with probabilistic or nonlinear processes. As a result,
               | exponential trends--such as pandemics, technological
               | growth, or financial compounding--often catch people by
               | surprise, even when the math is straightforward.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | The lily pad example of the lake being half full on the
               | 29th day out of 30 is also a good one.
        
           | bobbylarrybobby wrote:
           | I think the proper way to compare probabilities/proportions
           | is by odds ratios. 99:1 vs 99999:1. (So a little more than
           | 1000x.) This also lets you talk about "doubling likelihood",
           | where twice as likely as 1/2=1:1 is 2:1=2/3, and twice as
           | likely again is 4:1=4/5.
        
           | AtlasBarfed wrote:
           | What's the required computation power for those extra 9s? Is
           | it linear, poly, or exponential?
           | 
           | Imo we got to the current state by harnessing GPUs for a
           | 10-20x boost over CPUs. Well, and cloud parallelization,
           | which is ?100x?
           | 
           | ASIC is probably another 10x.
           | 
           | But the training data may need to vastly expand, and that
           | data isn't going to 10x. It's probably going to degrade.
        
         | littlestymaar wrote:
         | > I'm really hoping GPT5 is a larger jump in metrics than the
         | last several releases we've seen like Claude3.5 - Claude4 or
         | o3-mini-high to o3-pro.
         | 
         | This kind of expectations explains why there hasn't been a
         | GPT-5 so far, and why we get a dumb numbering scheme instead
         | for no reason.
         | 
         | At least Claude eventually decided not to care anymore and
         | release Claude 4 even if the jump from 3.7 isn't particularly
         | spectacular. We're well into the diminishing returns at this
         | point, so it doesn't really make sense to postpone the major
         | version bump, it's not like they're going to make a big leap
         | again anytime soon.
        
           | Voloskaya wrote:
           | > We're well into the diminishing returns at this point
           | 
           | Scaling laws, by definition have always had diminishing
           | returns because it's a power law relationship with
           | compute/params/data, but I am assuming you mean diminishing
           | beyond what the scaling laws predict.
           | 
           | Unless you know the scale of e.g. o3-pro vs GPT-4, you can't
           | definitively say that.
           | 
           | Because of that power law relationship, it requires adding a
           | lot of compute/params/data to see a big jump, rule of thumb
           | is you have to 10x your model size to see a jump in
           | capabilities. I think OpenAI has stuck with the trend of
           | using major numbers to denote when they more than 10x the
           | training scale of the previous model.
           | 
           | * GPT-1 was 117M parameters.
           | 
           | * GPT-2 was 1.5B params (~10x).
           | 
           | * GPT-3 was 175B params (~100x GPT-2 and exactly 10x Turing-
           | NLG, the biggest previous model).
           | 
           | After that it becomes more blurry as we switched to MoEs (and
           | stopped publishing), scaling laws for parameters applies to a
           | monolithic models, not really to MoEs.
           | 
           | But looking at compute we know GPT-3 was trained on ~10k
           | V100, while GPT-4 was trained on a ~25k A100 cluster, I don't
           | know about training time, but we are looking at close to 10x
           | compute.
           | 
           | So to train a GPT-5-like model, we would expect ~250k A100,
           | or ~150k B200 chips, assuming same training time. No one has
           | a cluster of that size yet, but all the big players are
           | currently building it.
           | 
           | So OpenAI might just be reserving GPT-5 name for this
           | 10x-GPT-4 model.
        
           | indigo945 wrote:
           | I have tried Claude 4.0 for agentic programming tasks, and it
           | really outperforms Claude 3.7 by quite a bit. I don't follow
           | the benchmarks - I find them a bit pointless - but
           | anecdotally, Claude 4.0 can help me in a lot of situations
           | where 3.7 would just flounder, completely misunderstand the
           | problem and eventually waste more of my time than it saves.
           | 
           | Besides, I do think that Google Gemini 2.0 and its massively
           | increased token memory was another "big leap". And that was
           | released earlier this year, so I see no sign of development
           | slowing down yet.
        
         | avereveard wrote:
         | There's a new set of metrics that capture advances better than
         | MMLU or it's pro version but nothing yet as standardized and
         | specifically very few have a hidden set of tests to keep
         | advancements from been from directional fine tuning.
        
       | nickandbro wrote:
       | "create a svg of a pelican riding on a bicycle"
       | 
       | https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/c3j6TEAP
       | 
       | in case anyone is interested
        
         | ikerino wrote:
         | Am I right to say: doesn't look better than anything we've seen
         | before?
        
       | ikerino wrote:
       | https://www.latent.space/p/o3-pro
       | 
       | Have completed around a dozen chats with o3-pro so far. Can't say
       | I'm impressed, output feels qualitatively very similar to regular
       | o3.
       | 
       | Tried feeding in loads of context as suggested in the article but
       | generally feels like a miss.
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | I am still not willing to upgrade to a Pro account. I pay $20 a
       | month for both Gemini and ChatGPT, and for what I need this is
       | currently enough.
       | 
       | I have dreamed of having powerful AI ever since I read Bertram
       | Raphael's great book Mind Inside Matter around 1978, getting
       | hooked on AI research and sometimes practical applications for my
       | life since then.
       | 
       | I can easily afford $200 for a Pro account but I get this nagging
       | feeling that LLMs are not the final path to the powerful AI I
       | have always dreamed of and I don't want to support this level of
       | hype.
       | 
       | I have lived through a few AI winters and I worry that
       | accountants will tally up the costs, environmental and money,
       | versus the benefits and that we collectively have an 'oh shit'
       | moment.
        
         | baq wrote:
         | LLMs would be transformative technology if all progress stopped
         | today if only for their NLP capabilities, but the recent models
         | obviously do so much more than that. Winter isn't coming in
         | that regard; what might happen if models won't get smarter from
         | here is a race to the bottom in token prices, which would still
         | be not bad at all for token buyers.
        
           | buu700 wrote:
           | Agreed. I've said exactly the same thing before. If GPT-4
           | from two years ago had turned out to be the endgame of LLM
           | technology, and we collectively spent the following 20 years
           | integrating those capabilities throughout the economy, even
           | that would be a profound change to the world as we know it.
           | 
           | If we froze LLM technology at present-day capabilities and
           | spent the next 20 years on that, I'd expect it to ultimately
           | look transformative in a similar way to the Internet. I mean
           | if you told me in fall 2022 that 2.5 years later I'd be
           | building software by meta-prompting and meta-meta-prompting
           | AI agents to write code overnight while I slept, I'd assume
           | that we were fictional characters in a Black Mirror episode.
        
         | jwrallie wrote:
         | I have trouble justifying the $20 tier when compared to other
         | offers for similar service from other providers. I think OpenAI
         | should, every once in a while, offer a new feature with no
         | delay to their Plus tier, with lots of limits of course.
        
         | linkage wrote:
         | You don't need a Pro account. I'm on the free tier and I'm
         | paying for o3-pro via the API. I spent just $3.70 in credits
         | yesterday to compare it against Claude 4 Opus.
        
       | paul7986 wrote:
       | GPT needs way better image creation! Today I asked it to create a
       | full image of a 2025 calendar highlighting all weekday workdays
       | excluding federal holidays. At the bottom of legend tell me how
       | many weekday work hours are available within criteria noted.
       | 
       | It created the image showing each month but when you looked at
       | each month it was so janky ... February 31st and other huge
       | errors!
       | 
       | I'm not using image creation to create 3d art for fun or art sake
       | im trying to use it to create utility images to share for
       | discussion with friends & co-workers. The above is just one of
       | many ways it fails when creating utility images!
        
         | mkl wrote:
         | Wrong tool for the job. Try asking it to generate an SVG
         | calendar with those features, or to generate Python code that
         | produces an SVG calendar with those features.
        
           | catlifeonmars wrote:
           | That makes sense. Naively, one would expect this to be the
           | type of reasoning that it should "figure out" on its own.
        
           | paul7986 wrote:
           | Well I just want to create utility images by typing the
           | request in a text box. Im betting a few to maybe a lot of
           | users are trying to create utility images too just by typing
           | in the prompt.
           | 
           | I shouldnt need to know how to do that as a GPT and or AI
           | user ... the AI should just do it for the user via their
           | request in the text box. That's the magic of AI to me.
        
       | vintagedave wrote:
       | > Update to o4-mini (June 6, 2025) > We are rolling back an
       | o4-mini snapshot, that we deployed less than a week ago and
       | intended to improve the length of model responses, because our
       | automated monitoring tools detected an increase in content flags.
       | 
       | Does anyone know what it did or returned? I had not seen
       | anything, nor have I read anything, about issues here.
        
       | honeybadger1 wrote:
       | Gemini still, for me, feels like the king for speed and accuracy.
        
         | GardenLetter27 wrote:
         | Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible - both in coding and text review.
         | 
         | DeepSeek isn't bad either (especially given its age now), and
         | Claude is great for coding and tool use but too damn expensive.
        
       | eru wrote:
       | I'm trying out o3-pro now with some algorithmic questions. It
       | seems to be doing alright, but it's taking an awfully long time
       | (as expected) and the UIs seem to time out a lot, especially the
       | Android app and the MacOS desktop app. The web interface seems
       | the least flaky, but that's not saying much.
        
         | varjag wrote:
         | I had my own programming question for a while, which all models
         | from all vendors been robustly failing so far. It is a known
         | problem with surprisingly few published implementations as it
         | had never been a part of leetcode, Euler or typical homework
         | assignments. Yesterday o3-pro cleared it, using a more obscure
         | algorithm I never even heard of.
        
           | reliabilityguy wrote:
           | Can you provide the details? Sounds intriguing
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | The frustrating thing about private problems like this is
             | that if you respond to requests like this, it'll become
             | part of the training data. I'm fairly certain HN is scraped
             | because several AIs know my HN alias and can replicate my
             | style of writing on demand.
             | 
             | PS: Thinking about it... that is a very specific kind of
             | disturbing feeling that only prolific online commenters can
             | experience...
             | 
             | There's a _soulless machine_ someone made that -- out of
             | billions of people on the planet -- specifically knows _me_
             | by name and at some level understands how I think and see
             | the world.
             | 
             | That's not even its explicit purpose! It and its maker have
             | never met me, interacted with me, or singled me out in any
             | way. Yet... it knows my voice and can copy it on demand.
        
               | okrad wrote:
               | Perhaps we are not as unique as we'd like to believe.
               | 
               | The machine does not understand you. The machine can
               | match your flavor of textual communication.
               | 
               | This can be done for audio with a relatively small number
               | of samples. Your iPhone has a feature called Personal
               | Voice which claims it can do it with 150 phrases/15
               | minutes of your time.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | Ha, just wait till it says specific correctly and reveals
               | it's true self to those that know me!
        
       | conradfr wrote:
       | Nitpicking but this page is not practical to share has there's no
       | individual url per post (AFAIK) (the # part is not picked up by
       | Slack etc to generate preview).
        
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