Christian Hendriksen

I'm sharing my practical guide to ChatGPT and Bing for social science and management studies. This document part of the effort to democratize AI capabilities in university settings. docs.google.com/document/d/15C… 🧵 1/8

@chehendriksen maybe you got gpt 5.5 for a second lol

GPT-5.4 Xtra high just gave a really, really good answer to an open theoretical question that seemed above what it would normally do. And it produced tokens way slower, maybe 10 tokens/s. Is OpenAI rolling something out, or reallocating compute?

Friendly reminder that last year, we discussed whether AI could do anything useful beyond undergraduate math at all.

@efwerr Good old regular chatty in the web interface

@chehendriksen was this in codex or chatgpt or api?

@AcerFur Most do not use GPT Pro, is my impression. But also, I don't think we should underestimate the friction with using these systems in terms of trusting them enough to put effort into using them for hard problems.

1) Either they’re not using GPT Pro, 2) They’re not following what I’ve said to do in the past (I think Quanyu Tang has been the only person to take it on board) …why not?

I’ve posted everything to the secret sauce behind why I and @Liam06972452 have managed to get so many AI resolutions to things, and yet people keep telling me AI models write nonsensical maths, and this tells me two things:

I was told I would always be able to identify AI images because it can't draw hands. /s

Something is changing with GPT-5.4 Pro in the chat UI. It is as if OpenAI is preparing to launch something.

I just reviewed a paper that should have been desk rejected (it happens) & I checked if openaireview running locally on my laptop via Claude Code using Gemma 4 could do a good enough job to desk reject it & it could. We can now screen papers with LLMs for the cost of electricity

@herbiebradley Same experience for me, ping @TheRealAdamG. The github integration is also broken

on gpt 5.4 pro the google drive integration has stopped working entirely, it seems unusable on 5.4 thinking it works but i have to "add sources" then tell the model in text form which document to use. this is 100x worse than the previous integration that let me pick the doc

According to Waymo's published data, their technology is preventing injuries & deaths. My view is that if this is true, and I have yet to see a debunking of their data, then we safety advocates should be welcoming the technology. If Waymo is lying or manipulating data, then write about how they're doing that! Instead the analysis in this recent Streetsblog article is limited to "the authors of the Waymo safety report work for Waymo!" FFS, are we going to toss out all the NYCDOT reports about how their bike lanes improve safety? Are we going to toss out the decongestion pricing reports because they were written by the transit employees who want transit to succeed? I hope not! Here's what we've been told by Waymo: ✅ 170.7 million rider-only miles driven without a human driver (equivalent to roughly 200 human lifetimes of driving). ✅ 92% fewer serious injury or worse crashes compared to human drivers in the same cities and conditions (0.02 incidents per million miles vs. 0.22 for humans; 35 fewer such crashes). ✅ 83% fewer airbag-deployment crashes in any vehicle (230 fewer crashes). ✅ 82% fewer injury-causing crashes overall (544 fewer crashes). ✅ 92% fewer pedestrian injury crashes compared to human benchmarks. ✅ 85% fewer cyclist injury crashes. ✅ 81% fewer motorcycle injury crashes. ✅ No fatalities caused by the Waymo Driver across these 170.7 million driverless miles. ✅ At current scale (over 4 million miles per week), Waymo prevents 1 serious injury crash every 8 days. If data is manipulated or false, then report on that. Otherwise you come out looking like someone who only likes safety benefits that aren't shaped like a car. It's going to set back Vision Zero advocacy in states across the country that are on the fence about allowing autonomous vehicle operations. Waymo does have a profit motive. So do corporations who build homes, distribute food, host concerts, publish books, and make medicine. Not all of them are the same and some are downright awful. Always challenge motives and incentives. What's interesting about Waymo is that they have a financial incentive in being the absolute safest form of motorized vehicle on the street. They'll lose business if their software is just as dangerous as an average human driver. But that in no way means streets must be overtaken by motor vehicles (theirs or any other brand). What do we want? 92% fewer pedestrian injury crashes compared to humans? 85% fewer cyclist injury crashes? Then come up with a way to let AVs into cities across the country.

@Miles_Brundage What are your thoughts on the argument about the (lack of) severity of vulnerabilities? E.g.: tomshardware.com/tech-industry/…

Seeing some wild Mythos vs X cope (where X is eg current generation models directed, with the benefit of hindsight, at finding things Mythos found; GPT-5.4 Pro on cherrypicked evals; etc.) I’m sure OAI has something good coming (Spud post train?) but come on, Mythos is obv good

A slide I'll use tomorrow with my master students. I'm sure it'll be a fun discussion.

@TheRealAdamG I just hope you'll release it for Windows immediately.

I am not sure if you heard...

@Inframethod Not yet. The cycles of paper development, submission, peer review, and revision are glacial at best.

@chehendriksen Have you published a paper yet where your use of AI is part of the methodology? I'm looking for examples of sophisticated AI use and its declaration in scholarly work.

People think I'm crazy when I tell them that access to GPT-5.4 Pro is worth 200$/month for me. Someone noted a few days ago she didn't even know it was possible to spend that much on an AI per month. But it's just an incredible model.

How on earth will AJPS enforce this?

What are the largest software engineering tasks AI can perform? In our new benchmark, MirrorCode, Claude Opus 4.6 reimplemented a 16,000-line bioinformatics toolkit — a task we believe would take a human engineer weeks. Co-developed with @METR_Evals. Details in thread.

Now that there's a $100 ChatGPT Pro tier, it's a no brainer for any economist to choose ChatGPT over Claude at EVERY price point. 1. $100/mo now gets you access to Pro in the web UI, which is invaluable for academic work. See x.com/aniketapanjwan… for how to optimally use Pro. No Anthropic model compares 2. $20/mo usage with Claude Code is a joke. $20/mo usage with Codex is limiting but not that far off of $100/mo Claude Code usage. I've myself experienced getting capped within an hour at $100/mo with Claude Code with normal usage. With $100/mo with Codex, for the typical economist's usage, you'll never hit 5 hour or weekly limits. 3. GPT 5.4 itself is a much better model than Opus 4.6 for almost everything economists would care about. CC has a better developed plugin ecosystem, subagents in CC work better IMO, and CC IMO is by default a better writer. For anything else - helping you understand papers, write code, plan out structural estimation, think through identification arguments, choose between estimators - I'd prefer Codex. 4. Whenever OpenAI has an outage, they reset usage for everyone, and they keep extending the length to which you get double usage from your subscription (now until end of May!). Anthropic is crunched heavily for compute and seems to be both explicitly ( x.com/trq212/status/…) and perhaps surreptitiously (x.com/om_patel5/stat…) trying to restrict their compute provision. 5. The Codex Desktop app is hands down the best interface for agentic coding right now. The Claude desktop app is probably the worst way to use Claude Code (go to /r/claudecode to read about all the bugs people encounter). There's a dearth of educational material about the Codex Desktop App though (which I will be solving soon) I walk through each of these points in more detail in this YouTube video: youtu.be/_oKPa8_7w3Y?si… So, what are the switching costs from Claude Code to Codex? > The models feel different/act differently. You have to get used to it. > Skills are an open format, so you can just copy all your skills over to ~/.agents/skills from ~/.claude/skills . There are some CC specific skill features which don't port over 1 to 1 to Codex. > Subagents are configured differently and act differently in CC compared to Codex. > Hooks are experimental in Codex and you have fewer options of harness actions onto which you can configure hooks. I'd say if you haven't yet started with these tools, choose Codex for sure. If you're hitting your Claude Code session limits regularly, then also switch to Codex for sure. If you're not hitting your session limits, or you have a $200+ budget, I'd recommend getting a $20/mo Codex sub and just try it out/feel it out. Codex and CC pair well together anyway, for example by having one write a plan/code and having the other review the plan/code. I have Codex at a $200/mo subscription and CC at a $100/mo subscription - that works well for me, I use Codex 80% of the time and CC 20% of the time.

One underrated aspect of doing talks on AI is that every week or so, something happens that lets me update my slides with interesting developments. On Monday, I'm giving a lecture on AI and societal risk. Suffice to say Project Glasswing is a timely event for this!

Claude Mythos sounds cool and powerful. Mysterious! But it can get better. How about GPT Legion. Claude Aegis. Gemini Nexus. Archon. Leviathan! There's a lot of cool names if the labs are leaning into ominous model names.