[westoncb]

Gotcha. Yeah, give o3 a try. If you don't want to get a sub, you can use it over the api for pennies. They do have you do this biometric registration thing that's kind of annoying if you want to use over api though.

You can get the Google pro subscription (forget what they call it) that's ordinarily $20/mo for free right now (1 month free; can cancel whenever), which gives unlimited Gemini 2.5 Pro access.

[andrepd]

> Gotcha. Yeah, give o3 a try. If you don't want to get a sub, you can use it over the api for pennies. They do have you do this biometric registration thing that's kind of annoying if you want to use over api though.

I hope you appreciate just how crazy this sentence sounds, even in an age when this is normalised.

[westoncb]

Yep, it's surreal.

[slacktivism123]

Yeah, this model didn't work it seems.

You're holding it wrong. You need to utter the right series of incantations to get some semblance of truth.

What, you used the model that was SOTA one week ago? Big mistake, that explains why.

You need to use this SOTA model that came out one day ago instead. That model definitely wasn't trained to overfit the week-old benchmarks and dismiss the naysayers. Look, a pelican!

What? You haven't verified your phone number and completed a video facial scan and passed a background check? You're NGMI.

[Hackbraten]

> Look, a pelican!

Love this reference :)

[bradly]

Thank you for the tip on o3. I will switch to that and see how it goes. I do have a paid sub for ChatGPT, but from the dropdown model descriptions "Great at coding" sounded better than "Advanced reasoning". And 4 is like almost twice as much as 3.

[TeMPOraL]

In my current experience:

- o3 is the bestest and my go-to, but its strength comes from it combining reasoning with search - it's the one model you can count on finding things out for you instead of going off vibe and training data;

- GPT 4.5 feels the smartest, but also has tight usage limits and doesn't do search like o3 does; I use it when I need something creative done, or switch to it mid-conversation to have it reason off an already primed context;

- o4-mini / o4-mini-hard - data transformation, coding stuff that doesn't require looking things up - especially when o3 looked stuff up already, and now I just need ChatGPT to apply it into code/diagrams;

- gpt-4o - only for image generation, and begrudgingly when I run out of quota on GPT 4.5

o3 has been my default starting model for months now; most of my queries generally benefit from having a model that does autonomous reasoning+search. Agentic coding stuff, that I push to Claude Code now.

[andrepd]

I've heard my grandma talk about Catholic saints and their powers with a not dissimilar kind of discourse.

[TeMPOraL]

Point being?

Unlike Catholic saints, ChatGPT models actually exhibit these properties in directly observable and measurable way. I wrote how I decide which model to use for actual tasks, not which saint to pray to.

[andrepd]

My grandma also uses saints for actual tasks (e.g. St Anthony for finding lost items), and they exibith those properties in observable ways (e.g. he found her sewing needles just last month). Perhaps the comparison is more appropriate than you realise.

> actually exhibit these properties in directly observable and measurable way

Well but do they? I don't mean your vibes, and I also don't mean cooked-up benchmarks. For example: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

[thedevilslawyer]

If not users opinions, or objective benchmarks, then what? Sounds like you prefer closing your ears saying 'nananana...'

[TeMPOraL]

> Perhaps the comparison is more appropriate than you realise.

Or perhaps you stop being obtuse. There's no causal connection between "using saints for actual tasks" and the outcomes, which is why we call this religion. In contrast, you can see the cause-and-effect relationship directly and immediately with LLMs - all it takes is going to chatgpt.com or claude.ai, typing in a query, and observing the result.

> Well but do they? I don't mean your vibes, and I also don't mean cooked-up benchmarks.

Do read the study itself, specifically the parts where the authors spell out specifically what is or isn't being measured here.

[agos]

the fact that one needs to know stuff like this and that it changes every three months seriously limits the usefulness of LLMs for me

[TeMPOraL]

I get this. On the one hand, those things I wrote down are just simple conclusions from immediate experience, not something I had to learn or feel burdened by - but on the other hand, when I look at similar lists for e.g. how to effectively use Claude Code, I recoil in horror.

There's a silver lining in this, though: none of that is any kind of deep expertise, so there's no need for up-front investment. Just start using a tool and pay attention, and you'll pick up on those things in no time.

[thedevilslawyer]

Being in the cutting edge isn't for everyone. If you can find an island where staying updated is optional you can choose that. Imo, these islands are fast shrinking.

[thom]

I’d also recommend basically always having search enabled. That’s eliminated major hallucinations for me.

[westoncb]

lol yep, fully get that. And I mean I'm sure o4 will be great but the '-mini' variant is weaker. Some of it will come down to taste and what kind of thing you're working on too but personal preferences aside, from the heavy LLM users I talk to o3 and gemini 2.5 pro at the moment seem to be top if you're dialoging with them directly (vs using through an agent system).