Jason April

There's much more to this Epstein story than meets the eye, let me tell you.

Key issues discussed during yesterday's GPT-5 AMA with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and some of the GPT-5 team on Reddit. Main topics were around sudden loss of 4o, 4.1, 4.5 and o3, GPT-5 feeling colder and shorter with creativity, memory and file handling regressions, tighter limits and smaller effective context, opaque autoswitching, overactive safety filters, and reduced trust after presentation errors. 👇 - Return of GPT-4o for Plus users Question: Users asked why 4o was removed and demanded that it return as a selectable model. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): “we are going to bring it back for plus users, and will watch usage to determine how long to support it.” - 4o and 4.1 availability together, plus voice concerns Question: Users asked to keep both 4o and 4.1 alongside GPT-5 and raised issues with Advanced Voice Mode. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said the team is looking into this now, asked whether both 4o and 4.1 are needed or if 4o would suffice, and said he would look into the voice mode issue. - Active work on restoring 4o Question: Users said GPT-5 felt like “wearing the skin of my dead friend” and pleaded to bring 4o back. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): “ok we hear you on 4o, working on something now.” - Router outage and immediate quality fix Question: Users reported GPT-5 felt “dumber” and asked what broke. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said there was a sev, the autoswitcher was down for part of day 1, which made GPT-5 seem worse, and that changes to the routing decision boundary are being deployed so people get the right model more often. - Model transparency Question: Users asked for clear indicators showing which model is responding. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said ChatGPT will become more transparent about which model answers a given query. - Manual control over “thinking” Question: Users asked for a way to manually trigger or avoid reasoning mode. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said the UI will change to make it easier to manually trigger thinking. - Rate limits for Plus Question: Plus users asked for higher limits after the update. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said OpenAI is going to double rate limits for Plus users as rollout completes. - Legacy access to 4o under evaluation Question: Users asked to keep using 4o long term. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said the team is looking into letting Plus users continue to use 4o and is gathering data on the tradeoffs. - Rollout pace and stability Question: Users asked why access and behavior were inconsistent. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said rollout to everyone is taking longer due to scale, and noted API traffic roughly doubled in the first 24 hours. - Mid-tier plan between Plus and Pro Question: Users requested a $40-ish tier for solo power users. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): “yes we will do something here.” - Screenless interfaces, voice, and neural links Question: Users asked about moving beyond the text box. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): “like with voice? yes,” and neural interfaces are “probably quite a ways away.” - Longer context windows Question: Users pressed for more than 32k in ChatGPT. Answer (Sam Altman, CEO): He said OpenAI has not seen strong demand signals for very long context in ChatGPT, compute is tight, and they are open to supporting longer context if clear use cases emerge, then asked what length users need and for what tasks. - Why so much purple in generated design mockups Question: Users noticed GPT-5 often picks purple in UI designs. Answer (Michelle Pokrass, Research): She said it is not always purple but it is the model’s favorite color, it is somewhat steerable if users ask for something specific, the bias emerged during training and proved resistant to changes, and the team will work on it in future models.

Grok 5 will be out before the end of this year and it will be crushingly good