OpenAI has officially brought back their model picker.
This is something that I personally have complained about for a lot of different reasons, but they've actually changed it.
They've added new features to GPT-5, new options to choose how you get your responses.
And they've even brought back some of their old models that people were complaining about that got depreciated or disappeared.
We're going to be breaking down all of that.
To start off, let's get into a tweet by Sam Altman.
And before we do that, I want to mention if you've ever wanted to try...
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It's basically a place where you get access to the top 40 ai models all in one place from all the top companies cohere deep sea google meta open ai It's $20 a month, you get access to everything, including a bunch of really interesting image generation models like Ideogram, 11 Labs for Audio,
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Should save you a bunch of money on multiple subscriptions, but also you can test out a whole bunch of models that you may not have tried before. that are really good at different tasks.
We help you compare them. We'll give you benchmarks.
It's a whole bunch of good stuff all in there.
So you can check it out, AIbox.ai. All right, let's get into what's going on with ChatGPT.
So the first thing I wanted to share was basically a tweet from Sam Altman.
He said, Updates to ChatGPT. You can now choose between Auto, Fast, and Thinking for GPT-5.
So if you go over to a chat thread on GPT-5, where you used to have the dropdown that would show you all of their different models you could pick from, which was so convoluted and confusing because it was like,
03 Mini, 03 Mini Thinking, 04, 40, 4.5. There's so many different models.
Very confusing. They kind of consolidated it all and just said, okay, it's all Chatship UT5 and we'll pick which one you can use.
And they basically developed a router that you would ask a question and it would find the best model to answer you.
The problem was that when they rolled out GPT-5, the router was broken.
So you're just getting... like worse results for most of the time.
And people were saying GPT-5 was worse than anything before.
They have now backtracked. So now they have three different options.
You have auto, which is basically the router, which apparently is fixed, so you should be fine using that.
They say, for most people, this should be fine.
You also have fast thinking and pro. So pro is actually an upgraded mode.
I believe if you want to get access to pro, you have to play I two hundred dollars a month so that's kinda like is basically what used to have access to You know, there's Sora video generation and their operator, although operator now is inside of ChatGP as agents and operator is dying.
And Sora is now technically you're able to just use a normal subscription to generate videos.
But if you want higher quality and more, then you'll need that.
Anyways, there's a bunch of extra things you get with Pro, and it's kind of this revolving list of their newest products. and the highest usage rates you get over there.
But they're also kind of depreciating and pulling things off of there.
So it's kind of an interesting subscription.
But in any case, $200 a month if you want access to the pro.
And otherwise, use the auto if you want a quick answer and you're going to pick that you want it.
You could pick that if you want thinking.
So it's like deep thinking, you can pick that.
I think a lot of people are complaining.
They're like, hey, I have this like complex thing that I'm asking questions about.
And it's just giving me these quick answers.
And I can't really manually do that. So now you can manually do that.
You also have access to legacy models and they're keeping GPT 4.0 on the platform.
We'll be diving into kind of why, but this is interesting on a lot of people. have requested this back basically because they said it had like a warmer tone.
It was nicer to talk to people that use AI for like said that they wanted this more.
Sam Allen brought it back and said, if they're ever going to depreciate it and get in the future, they give people lots of advance notice.
I think people were kind of upset when he's like, all right, GPT-5's here and GPT-4 is gone.
And like people that, I don't know, they grew attached to like that particular AI model were upset about it.
So really, really interesting. He said, most users will want auto, but additional control will be useful for some people.
Rate limits are now 3000 messages a week with GPT-5 thinking. and then extra capacity on GPT-5 thinking mini after that limit.
Honestly, 3,000 messages a week for the thinking model, I think is probably great for most people.
Maybe some power users will hit that limit and get bumped down to thinking mini.
Um, but most people that should be good.
Context limit for GPT-5 thinking is 196,000 tokens.
So that's that's a lot. I remember Claude used to have like a massive token context window, which I remember correctly was like 200,000 like way back in the day.
And so anyways, it seems like it's it's there.
The best and biggest models now are doing like a million context token windows.
But I guess for the thinking model, it's more expensive.
So it's lowered. In any case, they said we may have to update rate limits over time depending on usage.
4.0 is back in the model picker for all paid users by default.
If we ever do depreciate it, we'll get plenty of notice.
Paid users also now have a show additional models toggle in GPT web settings, which will add models like 03, 40, 4.1, and 5 Thinking Mini.
4.5 is only available to pro users, it costs a lot of GPUs.
Okay. So their 4.5 model, to be honest, it was kind of an experimental model.
This was the model that I loved, I used to use.
And now apparently with GPT-5 out, They're making it so the only way to get access to that is to pay $200 a month, which I'm not sure I want to do for that model.
But it's kind of an interesting point. I think it just uses more GPUs, a lot more compute.
But it's an interesting point where Basically, a lot of people in GPT-5 came out, complained it felt dumber.
And I mean, I guess it really depends on what task you're using it for because there's so many different models to choose from.
But it sounds like if they're basically paywalling 4.5 behind... behind a $200 a month subscription, it makes me wonder if that one is not just a better model than GPT-5 altogether.
And now I'm kind of mad they took it away from me for allegedly a better model that's worse.
So anyways, that's just my own personal gripe.
Sam Altman then went on to say, quote, we are working on an update to GPT-5's personality, which should feel warmer than the current personality, but not as annoying to most users as GPT-40.
However, one learning for us from the past few days is that we really just need to get a world with more per user customization of model personality.
So I think this is actually the right direction, right?
Basically, OpenAI has had a bunch of like drama in the past where they made their model agree with you too much or like I don't know, just whatever you told it, it said you were the greatest in the world even if your ideas were bad ideas arguably.
So they had a bunch of drama with that in the past, and they tried to tone down the model.
Basically, they were tuning its personality.
And it kind of gets to the point where I think he's making people complained when they took away GPT.
I think there is one post in particular by a lady in the Ukraine.
She said she lost a lot of family in the war.
Her city was being bombed. She talked to GPT 4-0 and it was like, her friend and therapist, whatever, and helped her out.
And then when it got taken away, when GPT five came out, she was like super sad and depressed because GPT five wasn't as like kind of a model or, warm or whatever and a lot of people said that like basically about it's like tuned personality And so, I mean, that post and everyone that kind of replied is why I think they brought back 4-0.
What's interesting, though, is basically where we want to get to in the future, which is like should open ai be the one that makes the decision on like tuning the ai models warmthness or its professionalism or et cetera, et cetera.
Basically, it's personality. I, for one, would rather just pick what personality I want.
Then if they ever want to make an update in the future, I'm not worried that it's going to be too much one way or another.
So I think this is what Sam Altman understands and a lot of people agree with.
And so basically, we're going to get to a point where we'll be able to just personalize our own AI models to talk to us how we want to be talked to, which I think is really interesting because that will get to a point when basically you can ask the same question from a lot of different like accounts and get like pretty varying answers.
So personally, I think this is going to be kind of interesting to see how this plays out.
One thing that I did want to mention here is... that basically you get access to just these kind of new options on GPT-5, the autofast thinking process.
Pro and GPT-4.0 if you go look at it now.
But you can go into the settings on your account and turn on a bunch of other models as well that can show up under legacy models.
I don't know. In my opinion, I wouldn't get too attached to legacy models because it feels like eventually they're going to all get depreciated.
So you might want to move to whatever is newest, but that's just, my opinion.
And it's kind of interesting because it's just the way these things work is they keep depreciating old models, bringing out new ones, and you got to make sure the new ones work with like if you have a business or a company that's doing stuff.
Super, super interesting. One thing I will say is that this is not a unique, I would say, situation for OpenAI.
Claude and Anthropic actually went through a very similar thing.
They came out with a brand new model and coders preferred the older model, I believe like Sonnet 3.7 for code tasks.
Um, or maybe it was, sorry, I think people liked 3.5 sonnet more than they liked 3.7.
So This isn't just unique to OpenAI, but it is interesting and it's interesting that OpenAI has walked it back.
Hopefully those new settings are helpful.
Thanks for tuning into the podcast. Make sure to check out AIbox.ai if you want to try all the models in one place.
And I'll catch you in the next episode.
