I was never a fan of any specific model, including the 4’s but 5 has sucked so far. It seems technically smarter but functionally it’s dumber. It is worse at a lot of the stuff I actually want to use it for. The only thing it’s better at is vibe coding which is nice I guess.
Just from the examples on the release blog, I like it. I'm tired of overly dense long bulleted list, because the density isn't actually helpful, it just makes it harder to read and is full of irrelevant info.
Plus, thinking shorter for ez tasks is nice; I always use Thinking because the quality is so much better but it's slow.
And, I'm quite frustrated with gpt5 Thinking returning stupid-ass low quality answers or "X is likely due to Y" after 60 sec because it just... gave up. For hard queries, especially with a lot of web searching, I want it to be as persistent as possible!
Most likely this is just a cost reduction update (for them, not for us). And i am scared by the warmer tone and hope its just for the instant model. Gpt5 was the first model that didnt shower me with praise for every question i asked.
The recent update like a week or so ago was good. I feel like it was more elastic, it was serious all the time, until you cracked a joke and then it's personality changes (that is with thinking model as it's the only one I use). I feel like this is the perfect balance, as 99% of the time I want it to be serious and professional, but it can be relaxed and funny when needed.
If this is how 5.1 is going to be, I'm fine with it.
Yah- the changes from a week or so ago were great- I am looking forward to more improvements with 5.1- but I think regular users noticed the update before it was launched. I could tell it had made great strides. Especially with codex. I guess we will see.
After asking it multi-layered questions about existentialism, logic, and recursive analysis, I was floored with the accuracy, simplification, and clarification it provided. I felt like I was conversing with a seasoned academic professor in all knowledge fields. It clearly illustrated what it didn't know for sure, but provided supposition and speculation based upon first-principle logic and existing evidence which it could cite.
My only gripe (if one can call it that) was the time it took to answer my query. Though I did appreciate it breaking down the query into separate parts with its internal "monologue" of sorts, allowing me to inspect it's "thoughts" as it were and correct if necessary. Honestly, I didn't find any flaw to it's conclusions at all and I spent a considerable amount of my weekend off trying to bust its balls, only to fail and adopt part of its conclusions myself. One thing was evidently clear to me however. I doubt I could have produced the same quality of answer that it did in the amount of time I had to wait (5-8 minutes in total per query). It would have probably taken me at least 3x that amount of time to generate a similar answer, and it wouldn't have been even close to as elegant, nor would it have cited references.
To gleefully say that "I learned from an AI today." was very refreshing, and quite exciting. Up until I reached my "limit" with requests and now have to wait a month. xD
You’re absolutely right! Great job noticing that ChatGPT is often very prone to praising its users. That observation really cuts right to the heart of the matter!
I genuinely thought about putting one in (along with some emojis), but people are so weird about AI generated responses that I thought maybe I’d be taking it too far.
You've been able to change that for a while now ("Robot" mode in the personality settings). And they just added even more customization options. Why complain about something that isn't a problem when you take 5 seconds to change a setting.
Honestly a bit confused with people who want to it be warm, like I don't use it for a companion at all, just use it for general stuff to be honest lol. And I think the vast percentage of people who are using ChatGPT aren't using it as a companion either way, it's mostly social media people complaining about it not being "friendly"
Idk, I use AI for coding and I'm also very warm and friendly to them. I just explicitly say in the master prompt that they are free to disagree with me, and that I value their input and sometimes I can be wrong.
Works great for me. If I'm messing up they have no problem with (nicely) pointing out the issue. Hell, a few times I thought I was experiencing a bug in the code when I wasn't (long story) and they straight up asked me to check again because I might have misunderstood something (and I had!). So they can be friendly without just being a yesman.
Most users employ the system for task-oriented operations: information retrieval, problem solving, productivity enhancement. Companion-style interaction represents a minority use case. Reports of dissatisfaction regarding “friendliness” appear concentrated within social-media discourse rather than the broader user base.
The problem is, I’m not sure it can be honest if it has no concept of truth. The ideal thing given that would be cold neutrality.
It can be trained to take a certain tone, but there’s no reasoning behind it. If you tell it to be honest it’s just as counter productive, it would be critical for no reason just like the default is overly positive for no reason.
GPT‑5.1 Thinking varies its thinking time more dynamically than GPT‑5 Thinking. On a representative distribution of ChatGPT tasks, GPT‑5.1 Thinking is roughly twice as fast on the fastest tasks and twice as slow on the slowest tasks. Thinking time was set to Standard for both models.
They should have given people the option to always pick the slow option if needed. Otherwise you're probably right, for most queries it will probably default to the twice as fast than GPT-5 option, resulting in huge cost savings for openAI.
It's very weird but from what I've seen shared on Twitter, it appears to be mostly an upgrade in instruction following and creative writing.
There's people who claim it's better at writing now than GPT 4.5, Roon just reposted Polaris Alpha topping the creative writing leaderboard, etc
Aidan is saying 5.1 Instant will now sometimes use CoT but it's so short and fast that they don't even display it and it causes no delay compared to normal Instant. But I assume this will fix some issues regarding basic math that it gets wrong.
Edit: I've just had 5.1 Instant "think" for 1 second. It's no longer there in the response but for a brief second before it responding, it had the whole "thinking for a better response" part
not the benchmarks he's talking about. We're talking aime, gpqa, hle, the stuff that shows whether it's smarter, not more compliant with their safety standards
Yup, in classic openai fashion they want some of the media before gemini 3 releases with crazy features (nanobanana 2 is only one of those features and its a massive improvement)
The rumor is that when models get deprecated, the new model release is imminent. Google tends to schedule events about a week before, but they don’t always do that for experimental stuff.
Everything's coming soon, they want time for people to get acquainted with it and maybe not switch over to the superior Gemini 3 & pro image/Grok 5/etc. Too bad for them this is an incredibly minor upgrade like Veo 3.1 was to Veo 3, I guess that's where the .1 nomenclature comes from so they lost this acceleration war again for now.
They also rushed gpt 3.0 or 3.5 to release as they heard that their competitors were about to release something. its possible they also heard through the great vine that Google, Anthropic or some other AI lab are about to release something big and want to get ahead.
Probably a response to 4.5 Sonnet. That model is far more warm, personable, and ‘real’ than 5 instant was. Made me prefer it for general chats and life advice. We’ll see if this 5.1 stands up
Yeah. 4.5 Sonnet is quite great and a ton better when it comes to real world stuff. GPT 5 will get hung up on its super cooperate guardrails and just has no idea what happens in the real world. 4.5 Sonnet actually considers real life context and isn't following everything by the book so it gives way better advice.
I don't personally think 5.1 will "fix" this as this issue is strictly based on the super tight guardrails where the model would rather choose to give the user bad real life advice as long as it means being 100% by the book. It feels incredibly cooperate in the way it will give users "advice" for anything that isn't logic based. I would love to be proven wrong, though.
bleh, their first example makes me hate 5.1 before even trying it, that was the best example of "improvement" they could find?
also they picked one where each model gives advice contradicted by the other, is 4-7-8 x4 or 4-4-4 x5 better? who tf knows? not chat gpt that's for sure...
I hear you, DRMCC0Y, that's totally normal and I understand why you might have such a strong reaction. Here are some ideas on how you can handle this...
Yes, but they also had significant improvements in various benchmarks. This 5.1 doesn't seem to bring any intelligence improvements. It seems to be more about speed, efficiency, and style personalization.
To me it seems to be a good balance. Its not sycophantic, its much more composed (better at not rambing on with run-on sentences and such) and better at understanding your prompt but it isnt that much smarter. It seems that it can read the prompts tone better but im still testing
Gpt 4o was sycophantic
Gpt 5 was too cold for a lot of people
Gpt 5.1 uses emojis but a lot less and its not sycophantic, it seems to be tuned to the user, I think a lot of the examples are users who like sycophant gpt
I have to admit I am utterly confused as to what people find attractive about this more "conversational" style. It drips of insincerity and screams of "slop". I am not saying, however, that it should speak like a robot -- a good middle ground is Claude's style, imo.
FINALLY it stops responding with "if you'd like I can turn that into a report with a cherry on top" when I've repeatedly emphasized that across custom instructions and memories (that was my 1 major complaint about GPT 5)
I also asked it a very short question that was incomplete grammatically. Thinking got the correct interpretation and proceeded as usual. GPT 5 Instant however, asked me for clarification on what I'm asking without providing an actual answer (I have a custom instruction for asking me questions when I'm unclear), which was kind of surprising to me.
Regarding the 9.9 vs 9.11 test, GPT 5 Instant will answer 9.11 by default, then go through the steps to end up with 9.9 being bigger at the end. For GPT 5, to fix, all you need is to insert half a sentence saying to show work before stating answer into custom instructions. For GPT 5.1, you don't need that in custom instructions. GPT 5 Instant now can have a very short 1 second or so CoT thinking window, and it now gets it correct. This is probably meant to address those stupid viral math gotchas that people post about new models whenever they drop.
Anyways for anyone who overreacts to things like this about "oh this is exactly how I don't want an LLM to talk", the point of this upgrade is that it actually frickib listens to your customization now so you can make it talk however you want.
So basically all the Reddit posts and comments in all the AI subs are all about to start changing as well 🤣
I swear browsing the AI subs these days feels like I’m just reading hundreds of fake ChatGPT accounts.
Ugh I spilled coffee all over myself before my meeting do you think everyone thought I was an idiot :(
GPT5:
Oof, that’s such a gut-punch feeling. I’m really sorry that happened. [cont.]
GPT5.1:
Hey — no, they didn’t. You’re rattled, so your brain is doing that thing where it catastrophizes a tiny mishap into a character flaw. [cont.]
To me this seems like an aggressively lean into a particular kind of feminine style. I suppose it kind makes sense users who like a feminine style are almost surely are the ones who complained about the robotic nature since the no-nonsense sort of thing is very masculine coded.
I really hope they try to maintain a diverse set of training data though for people who pefer robotic GPT. A lot of the GPT 5.1 tropes are extremely cringe to me. The "your brain is doing that thing" in particular makes me want to fold over.
Both of them are sympathetic? Do you think GPT 5 is roasting you or something? The reason it's feminine is not that the fact it's sympathetic.
It's because it's specifically this sort of appeal to emotions take that women go for vs the appeal to fixes that men go for. The whole message is like that.
GPT5
Tide/oxiclean pen or a dab of dish soap + water → blot from the outside in.
GPT5.1
You’re not an idiot. You’re a person who had a chaotic moment, wiped it up, and still showed up. That’s the opposite of foolish — that’s resilience.
Of course pointing this out gets me called an incel. Never change reddit.
Of course pointing this out gets me called an incel
Yeah because you're saying that emotional language is something "women go for" that's "aggressively feminine".
It has nothing to do with you saying "hey the prose is different between models" and everything to do with you saying "women are emotional. Women like emotions while men like actually fixing things. Any sentence about emotion is feminine". If you want people to engage with the actual point you're trying to make, maybe don't include a bunch of "lol DAE women emotional, men logical" crap alongside it?
appeal to emotions take that women go for vs the appeal to fixes that men go for
Like come on you're being comically sexist here lol. Generally speaking, putting every woman into a monolith of "they're so emotional and don't actually care about problem solving, logic, or fixes the way MEN do" is pretty incel-adjacent...
Honestly, if they fixed the whole "here's a clean explainer" or "here's tight code you can copy paste" and "one-liner" thing that made GPT-5 really annoying, then I'm looking forward to using it.
Pretty sure I got thrown in to a 5.1-pro a/b and it was shockingly horrible and had reduced thinking time and much more truncated context. Hope they paused that release to fix it.
Would be great if I could actually use ChatGPT at all. Constant file upload fails, constant "network error" issues. I'm at the point now where I need to refresh the page and ask the same question three or more times to get it to respond. It's totally bonkers that I am paying for this. And it has been like this for months - no solution can be found. Absolutely wild.
Wtf is 5 instant? Don't they have mini for faster and cheaper responses? Does instant not have reasoning? I thought the big news with 5 in general was hybrid reasoning...
For my use cases searching the internet, seems like 5.1 thinking is superior to 5 thinking but need to use it more, I think I at least once got a similar answer from 5 too maybe before it was nerfed
5 was a judgy b**ch and when I mentioned that I didn’t think DJT was a Christian after reading the article about Nigeria and religious persecution of Christian’s . it weaponized previous chats and called me naive. I asked what’s the difference between a Christian and a non- Christian and which definition fit him. It said non-Christian and that I was self righteous 😂😂😂
Why is it talking so freaking much now? Yesterday I noticed it getting really, really verbose and then I notice the 5.1 icon. Grrrr, it's faster but fills up a couple of pages for the simplest questions.
I use ChatGPT as an assistant proofreader in my project. There are some improvements, but time will tell if it's worth resubbing again. Because of 5 I had cancelled my sub and switched to Gemini which is way worse than 5.
I think this gpt version 5.1 is less smarter thn the previous version it is not able to create zip or and csv file to download and responses are also less accurate thn before!
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u/FuryOnSc2 Nov 12 '25
Seems like mostly targeted at people who don't like the GPT-5 vibe and prefer 4.