[HN Gopher] ChatGPT 5 is slow and no better than 4
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ChatGPT 5 is slow and no better than 4
Have general LLMs clearly peaked?
Author : iwontberude
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-08-09 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
| iwontberude wrote:
| This is intended to be a discussion thread speculating about why
| ChatGPT 5 is so slow and why it seems to be no better than
| previous versions.
| labrador wrote:
| GPT-5 is better as a conversational thinking partner than GPT-4o.
| It's answers are more concise, focused and informative. The
| conversation flows. GPT-5 feels more mature than GPT-4o with less
| juvenile "glazing."
|
| I can't speak to other uses such as coding, but as a sounding
| board GPT-5 is better than GPT-4o, which was already pretty good.
| GPT-5's personality has definitely shifted to a more professional
| tone which I like.
|
| I do understand why people are missing the more synchophant
| persoanlity of GPT-4o, but I'm not one of them.
| saulpw wrote:
| That sounds 10% better, not 10x better. That's close enough to
| 'peaked'.
| labrador wrote:
| Agreed. Sam Altman definitely over-hyped GPT-5. It's not so
| much more capable that it deserves a major version number
| bump.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| Surely a major version bump says more about the internals
| than the capabilities
| labrador wrote:
| I see your point from a software engineering perspective
| but unfortuately that's not how the public sees it. The
| common perception is that we are making leaps towards
| AGI. I never thought AGI was close so I'm not
| disappointed, but a lot of people seem to be. On the
| other hand, I've seen comments like "I guess my fears of
| a destructive super-intelligence were over-blown."
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People seem to make this exact comment on here at every gpt
| release. I wonder what gpt we ought to actually be on?
| 1.4.6?
| labrador wrote:
| In retrospect I would have named it as follows:
|
| GPT-4 -> GPT-4 Home
|
| GPT-5 -> GPT-4 Enterprise
|
| Because my impression after using GPT-5 that it is
| designed to satisfy the needs of Microsoft mainly.
| Microsoft has no interest in making AI therapists or AI
| companions, probably because of the legal liability.
| Also, that's outside their core business.
| coldtea wrote:
| 3.something.
|
| They make "this exact comment on here at every gpt
| release" because every GPT release is touted as
| revolutionary and it's increasinly a smaller bump.
| torginus wrote:
| I still think it's a solid achievement, but weirdly
| positioned. It's their new-poverty spec model, available to
| everyone, and is likely not too large.
|
| It's decently good at coding, and math, beating current
| SOTA of Opus 4.1 by a small margin, while being much
| cheaper and faster to run, hinting at likely a much smaller
| model.
|
| However it's no better at trivia or writing emails or
| essays, which is what regular people who use ChatGPT
| through the website actually care about, making this launch
| come off as awkward.
| hoppp wrote:
| They gonna release new models like apple releases iphones,
| same stuff little tweaks and improvements.
| al_borland wrote:
| By definition, if something is still getting 10% better each
| year it hasn't yet peaked. Not even close.
| coldtea wrote:
| Getting 10% better over this last year compared to, say,
| 100% and 50% and 25% better the 4-5 years before?
|
| I'd say that points to it being very close to peaked.
|
| Nobody said anything about a steady 10% year-over-year
| being the case forever...
| mikert89 wrote:
| Have you used the Pro version? Its incredible
| binarymax wrote:
| My primary use case for LLMs are running jobs at scale over an
| API, and not chat. Yes it's very slow, and it is annoying.
| Getting a response from GPT-5-mini for <Classify these 50 tokens
| as true or false> takes 5 seconds, compared to GPT-4o which takes
| about a second.
| jscheel wrote:
| Doing quite a bit of that as well, but I've held off moving
| anything to gpt-5 yet. Guessing it's a capacity issue right
| now.
| hoppp wrote:
| If its 5 seconds maybe you are better off renting a GPU server
| and running the inference where the data is, without round
| trips and you can use gpt-oss
| beering wrote:
| The 5 seconds delay is probably due to reasoning. Maybe try
| setting it to minimal? If your use case isn't complex maybe
| reasoning is overkill and gpt-4.1 would suffice.
| darepublic wrote:
| They took away o3 on plus for this :(
| Buttons840 wrote:
| o3 was surprisingly good at research. I once saw it spend 6
| full minutes researching something before giving an answer, and
| I wasn't using the "research" or "deep think" or whatever it's
| called, o3 just decided on its own to do that much research.
| gooodvibes wrote:
| Not having the choice to use the old models is a horrible user
| experience. Taking 4o away so soon was a crime.
|
| I don't feel like I got anything new, I feel like something got
| taken away.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| 4o and perhaps a few other of the older models are coming back.
| Altman already stated so.
| pseudo_meta wrote:
| API is noticeably slower for me, sometimes up to 10x slower.
|
| Upon some digging, it seems that part of the slowdown is due to
| the gpt-5 models by default doing some reasoning (reasoning
| effort "medium"), even for the nano or mini model. Setting the
| reasoning effort to "minimal" improves the speed a lot.
|
| However, to be able to set the reasoning effort you have to
| switch to the new Response API, which wasn't a lot of work, but
| more than just changing a URL.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I'm noticing significant differences already.
|
| Code seems to work on the first try more often for me too.
|
| Perhaps my favorite change so far is the difference of verbosity.
| Some of the responses I am receiving when asking trivial
| questions are now are merely a handful of sentences instead of a
| dissertation. However, dissertation mode comes back when
| appropriate, which is also nice.
|
| Edit: Slightly tangential, but I forgot to ask, do any of you all
| have access to the $200/month plan? If so, how does that model
| compare to GPT-5?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It's the same model at the $200 price point.
| al_borland wrote:
| It feels slower, but if the quality is better, so one response
| will do instead of multiple follow up questions, it's still
| faster overall. It's also still orders of magnitude faster than
| doing the research manually.
|
| I'm reminded of that Louis CK joke about people being upset about
| the WiFi not working on their airplane.
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