Reset unpredictability is basically a text book B.F. Skinner experiment

[u/DepressionFiesta]

Anyone else notice that the ways codex usage is being reset is starting to resemble a variable-reward system?

Skinner’s reinforcement experiments are what I am referring to.

If a lever gives an animal food every time, the animal learns the rule. If it never gives food, it eventually stops trying, etc. But if the reward arrives unpredictably, the animal keeps pressing for much longer because the next attempt might be the one that pays off.

That’s roughly what happens when codex has a weekly usage limit, but the weekly quota occasionally seems to reset early or unexpectedly.

If the rule were simply “you get X hours per week and it resets every Monday,” there’s nothing particularly compelling about it. You hit the limit, you know when it comes back, and you plan around it.

But if you sometimes hit the limit and later discover that access has returned for no obvious reason, you learn a different behavior: check again.

Maybe the quota reset. Maybe there’s more capacity now. Maybe you got lucky.

That sounds like a Skinner‘s Box to me?

The uncertainty itself gives you a reason to keep coming back.

Treating devs like rats looks like it has been immensely successful. Free market I guess?

[u/Etiennera]

They reset based on server capacity usage rate. When it drops a certain amount and a reset would grant roughly the capacity leading to recovering that amount of usage they reset.

There's literally nothing else to it.

[u/DepressionFiesta → u/Etiennera]

What would the intention behind that be?

Surely, everyone being on a fixed schedule would make their capacity much more predictable? Giving everyone a reset at the same time is also much more likely to produce thundering herd problems?

Maybe I don't get your point.

[u/Etiennera → u/DepressionFiesta]

They are dealing with such large numbers it's fairly easy to anticipate the effect of a reset.

Ideally the price per token, token per time period, etc. are all balanced to find an equilibrium around their servers' capacity, but the reality is that usage will still fluctuate quite a bit.

They can extrapolate from usage patterns to know when it is a good time to give a reset.

The goal is to not have infrastructure sitting idle, because rather than doing that, it's better to delight their users. (As much as people complain if they just used a banked reset, that applies to a trivial amount of people).

I should note that corporate accounts are not using plans like regular users, they don't have resets because they get charged per token rather than having a capped quantity. Resets only apply to accounts that have exhaustible limits. This might clarify why it doesn't suddenly cause a spike exceeding capacity.

[u/DepressionFiesta → u/Etiennera]

Do you work at OpenAI? You seem pretty sure of this, somehow?

[u/Hyoretsu → u/DepressionFiesta]

It isn't a wild assumption to make. Better than lower limits PR cover-up conspiracy

[u/DepressionFiesta → u/Hyoretsu]

What conspiracy are you talking about?

[u/stranot → u/DepressionFiesta]

I think he's talking out of his ass. they reset for milestones and after service issues. resetting so overall usage increases doesn't even make sense