[orbital-decay]

> in general I find GPT 5.x to actually be a huge breakthrough in terms of asserting itself when I’m wrong

That's just a different bias purposefully baked into GPT-5's engineered personality on post-training. It always tries to contradict the user, including the cases where it's confidently wrong, and keeps justifying the wrong result in a funny manner if pressed or argued with (as in, it would have never made that obvious mistake if it wasn't bickering with the user). GPT-5.0 in particular was extremely strongly finetuned to do this. And in longer replies or multiturn convos, it falls into a loop on contradictory behavior far too easily. This is no better than sycophancy. LLMs need an order of magnitude better nuance/calibration/training, this requires human involvement and scales poorly.

Fundamental LLM phenomena (ICL, repetition, serial position biases, consequences of RL-based reasoning etc) haven't really changed, and they're worth studying for a layman to get some intuition. However, they vary a lot model to model due to subtle architectural and training differences, and impossible to keep up because there are so many models and so few benchmarks that measure these phenomena.

[Uehreka]

By the time I switched to GPT 5 we were already on 5.1, so I can't speak to 5.0. All I can say is that if the answer came down to something like "push the bias in the other direction and hope we land in the right spot"... well, I think they landed somewhere pretty good.

Don't get me wrong, I get a little tired of it ending turns with "if you want me to do X, say the word." But usually X is actually a good or at least reasonable suggestion, so I generally forgive it for that.

To your larger point: I get that a lot of this comes down to choices made about fine tuning and can be easily manipulated. But to me that's fine. I care more about if the resulting model is useful to me than I do about how they got there.

[zarzavat]

I find both are useful.

Claude is my loyal assistant who tries its best to do what I tell it to.

GPT-5 is the egotistical coworker who loves to argue and point out what I'm doing wrong. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's confidently wrong. It's useful to be told I'm wrong even when I'm not. But I'm not letting it modify my code, it can look but not touch.

[raducu]

> That's just a different bias purposefully baked into GPT-5's engineered personality on post-training.

I want to highlight this realization! Just because a model says something cool, it doesn't mean it's an emergent behavior/realization, but more likely post-training.

My recent experience with claude code cli was exactly this.

It was so hyped here and elsewhere I gave it a try and I'd say it's almost arrogant/petulant.

When I pointed out bugs in long sessions it tried to gaslight me that everything was alright, faked tests to prove his point.

[Nora23]

By the time GPT 5.5 landed we were already on 5.1, honestly they seem to converge on similar limitations around compositional reasoning.