[deaux]

It looks like you do pull shenanigans like these [0]. The person you're replying to even mentioned "ChatGPT 5.2", but you're specifically talking only about the API, while making it sound like it applies across the board. Also appreciate the attempt to further hide this degradation of the product they paid for from users by blocking the prompt used to figure this out.

Happy to retract if you can state [0] is false.

[0] https://x.com/btibor91/status/2018754586123890717

[tedsanders]

Yes, independent of the API speedup, we also recently reduced the thinking effort in ChatGPT. Our intent here was purely user experience, not cost savings. People have complained about the slow speeds of the Thinking models for a long time (myself included), so we recently retuned it to be faster, at the expense of less thoroughness.

I won't BS you that costs are never part of our decision making. If costs didn't matter, we'd have unlimited rate limits and 10M token context windows and subscription pricing of $0. But as someone in the room where these decisions are made, I can honestly report that our goal is almost always trying to figure out how to make people happier, not trick them. We're trying to fairly earn subscriptions, not scam anyone. In the cases where we have accidentally misled people (e.g., saying voice mode was weeks away), it was optimistic planning, not nefarious intent.

API model behavior is guaranteed to nearly stay the same (modulo standard non-determinism, bugs, etc.). ChatGPT is harder to promise, not because we pull more shenanigans there, but just because we might tweak system prompts, add/remove tools, run A/B tests, etc. that vary performance a bit. But we definitely don't do things like quantize during busy parts of the day or nerf models after publishing evals - that would feel pretty shady.

[offnominal]

Did they reduce thinking effort on Codex too? It seems to have become significantly worse in the past couple of days. It keeps making dumb mistakes (that it wouldn't earlier), so my chats are much longer to get it to fix them. That might be more expensive for OpenAI (and me!).

[empath75]

Chatgpt 5.2 in the past couple of weeks has gotten noticeably worse for me to the point that I stopped using it and just ask claude code questions instead.

[quinncom]

I’m so disappointed by this. It’s immediately noticeable that the results for the types of queries I make are worse. Queries using 5.2 Thinking now return very quickly, but with noticeably worse results.

[tedsanders]

It's unfortunately hard to make everyone happy. For now we're going to keep the default where it is, but we'll bump extended back up so that people can still get longer reasoning when they want it.

[pickleRick243]

This makes no sense. Why lower extended thinking time? Those who want faster answers can just use standard. The only purpose this serves is to "trick" the user into thinking he's still receiving "extended thinking" level answers at faster speed.

[virgildotcodes]

Would love a direct response to this.