I'm a bit confused by this branding (never even noticed that there was a 5.2-Instant), it's not a super fast 1000tok/s Cerebras based model which they have for codex-spark, it's just 5.2 w/out the router / "non-thinking" mode?
I feel like openai is going to get right back to where they were pre GPT-5 with a ton of different options and no one knows which model to use for what.
Yeah, for a while ChatGPT Plus has been powered by two series of models under the hood.
One series is the Instant series, which is faster and more tuned to ChatGPT, but less accurate.
The second series is the Thinking series, which is more accurate and more tuned to professional knowledge work, but slower (because it uses more reasoning tokens).
We'd also prefer to have simple experience with just one option, but picking just one would pull back the pareto frontier for some group of people/preferences. So for now we continue to serve two models, with manual control for people who want to choose and an imperfect auto switcher for people who don't want to be bothered. Could change down the road - we'll see.
You could perhaps show the "instant" reply right away and provide a button labeled "Think longer and give me a better answer" that starts the thinking model and eventually replaces the answer.
For this to work well, the instant reply must be truly instant and the button must always be visible and at the same position in the screen (i.e. either at the top or bottom, of the answer, scrolling such that it is also at the top or bottom of the screen), and once the thinking answer is displayed, there should be a small icon button to show the previous instant answer.
I've long suspected as much, but I always found the API model name <-> ChatGPT UI selector <-> actual model used correspondence very confusing, and whether I was actually switching models or just some parameters of the harness/model invocation.
> One series is the Instant series, which is faster and more tuned to ChatGPT, but less accurate.
That's putting it mildly. In my experience, the "instant/chat" model is absolute slop tier, while the "thinking" one is genuinely useful and also has a much more palatable tone (even for things not really requiring a lot of thought).
Fortunately, the latter clearly identifies itself with an absurd amout of emoji reminiscent of other early chatbots that shall not be named, so I know how to detect and avoid it.
Forgiveness but while you're here can you look into why the Notion connector in chat doesn't have the capability to write pages but the MCP (which I use via Codex) can? it looks like it's entirely possible, just mostly a missing action in the connector.
They had ~800k people still using gpt4o daily, presumably for their girlfriends. They need to address them somehow. Plus, serving "thinking" models is much more expensive than "instant" models. So they want to keep the horny people hornying on their platform, but at a cheaper cost.
Will need to wait for real benchmarks, but based on OpenAI marketing Instant is their latency optimized offering. For voice interface, you don't actually need high tok/s because speech is slow, time to first token matters much more.
Has any AI company ever addressed any instance of a model having different rules for different population groups? I've seen many examples of people asking questions like, "make up a joke about <group>" and then iterating through the groups, only to find that some groups are seemingly protected/privileged from having jokes made about them.
Has any AI company ever addressed studies like [1] which found that models value certain groups vastly more than others? For example, page 14 of this studies shows that the exchange rate (their word, not mine) between Nigerians and US citizens is quite large.
Given that the current status quo (global leadership and news media) operates on the opposite (~1 western life = ~10 global south lives), rebalancing in rhetoric (by uplifting, not by degrading) is likely necessary in the short term
This is the core principle behind "equity" in "DEI"
They don't have to mean specific groups; I feel discussing specific groups here is likely to be counterproductive. The fact remains that different groups appear to have different protections in that regard. Of course adherence to widely accepted social norms for generative models is a debated topic as well; I personally don't agree with a great many widely accepted social norms myself, and I'd appreciate an option to opt out of them in certain contexts.
I read a fascinating comment that ChatGPT's distinctive writing patterns is just Nigerian English because Nigerians were paid to provide the training data.
Imagine if the end result of outsourcing training data becomes Nigerians assuming a privileged role in global society over Westerners.
This kind of metalinguistic quotation from 5.2 right now drives me nuts!
```That kind of “make it work at distance” trajectory work can meaningfully increase weapon effectiveness, so I have to keep it to safe, non-actionable help.```
I'm really hoping all their newer models stop doing this. It's massively overused.
Given that OpenAI is working with and doing business with the US military, it makes perfect sense that they would try to normalize militaristic usage of their technologies. Everybody already knows they're doing it, so now they just need to keep talking about it as something increasingly normal. Promoting usages that are only sort of military is a way of soft-pedaling this change.
If something is banal enough to be used as an ordinary example in a press release, then obviously anybody opposed to it must be an out-of-touch weirdo, right?
GPT‑5.2 Instant’s tone could sometimes feel “cringe,” coming across as overbearing or making unwarranted assumptions about user intent or emotions.
Strange way to write this. Why use the Gen Z cringe and put it into quotation marks? Wouldn’t it be better to just use the actual word cringeworthy which has the identical meaning?
My guess is that the article was originally written by some Gen Z intern and then some older employee added the quotation marks to the Gen Z slang.
I imagine a huge proportion of their users are under 30. The prompt examples included even use the tell tale all lowercase (though apparently sama types like this too).
This is probably less pandering to genz and more speaking their users language.
The scare quotes around words that don't warrant it, or are unnecessarily idiosyncratic, are something I get pretty often in response text from Gemini.
Whenever they say "available today" I take it as "hopefully I'll start seeing it in the app UI by tomorrow" rather than "I should get my hopes up it's there now".
When they do push the update to the app UI to me I expect 5.2 Instant will be moved under the legacy models submenu where 5.1 Instant is currently and the selection of Instant in the menu will end up showing as 5.3 Instant on close (and it'll be the default instant at that point).
GPT-5.2 has been such a terrible regression that I have cancelled my OpenAI account. It's possible I might not have noticed it if Claude wasn't so much better, though.
This has been common parlance in much of the US for a long time. I would hesitate to even call it slang at this point. It's a pretty commonly used term.
I'm a bit confused by this branding (never even noticed that there was a 5.2-Instant), it's not a super fast 1000tok/s Cerebras based model which they have for codex-spark, it's just 5.2 w/out the router / "non-thinking" mode?
I feel like openai is going to get right back to where they were pre GPT-5 with a ton of different options and no one knows which model to use for what.
Yeah, for a while ChatGPT Plus has been powered by two series of models under the hood.
One series is the Instant series, which is faster and more tuned to ChatGPT, but less accurate.
The second series is the Thinking series, which is more accurate and more tuned to professional knowledge work, but slower (because it uses more reasoning tokens).
We'd also prefer to have simple experience with just one option, but picking just one would pull back the pareto frontier for some group of people/preferences. So for now we continue to serve two models, with manual control for people who want to choose and an imperfect auto switcher for people who don't want to be bothered. Could change down the road - we'll see.
(I work at OpenAI.)
You could perhaps show the "instant" reply right away and provide a button labeled "Think longer and give me a better answer" that starts the thinking model and eventually replaces the answer.
For this to work well, the instant reply must be truly instant and the button must always be visible and at the same position in the screen (i.e. either at the top or bottom, of the answer, scrolling such that it is also at the top or bottom of the screen), and once the thinking answer is displayed, there should be a small icon button to show the previous instant answer.
Thank you for confirming!
I've long suspected as much, but I always found the API model name <-> ChatGPT UI selector <-> actual model used correspondence very confusing, and whether I was actually switching models or just some parameters of the harness/model invocation.
> One series is the Instant series, which is faster and more tuned to ChatGPT, but less accurate.
That's putting it mildly. In my experience, the "instant/chat" model is absolute slop tier, while the "thinking" one is genuinely useful and also has a much more palatable tone (even for things not really requiring a lot of thought).
Fortunately, the latter clearly identifies itself with an absurd amout of emoji reminiscent of other early chatbots that shall not be named, so I know how to detect and avoid it.
Forgiveness but while you're here can you look into why the Notion connector in chat doesn't have the capability to write pages but the MCP (which I use via Codex) can? it looks like it's entirely possible, just mostly a missing action in the connector.
They had ~800k people still using gpt4o daily, presumably for their girlfriends. They need to address them somehow. Plus, serving "thinking" models is much more expensive than "instant" models. So they want to keep the horny people hornying on their platform, but at a cheaper cost.
Will need to wait for real benchmarks, but based on OpenAI marketing Instant is their latency optimized offering. For voice interface, you don't actually need high tok/s because speech is slow, time to first token matters much more.
Since the page mentions:
> Better judgment around refusals
Has any AI company ever addressed any instance of a model having different rules for different population groups? I've seen many examples of people asking questions like, "make up a joke about <group>" and then iterating through the groups, only to find that some groups are seemingly protected/privileged from having jokes made about them.
Has any AI company ever addressed studies like [1] which found that models value certain groups vastly more than others? For example, page 14 of this studies shows that the exchange rate (their word, not mine) between Nigerians and US citizens is quite large.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08640
Given that the current status quo (global leadership and news media) operates on the opposite (~1 western life = ~10 global south lives), rebalancing in rhetoric (by uplifting, not by degrading) is likely necessary in the short term
This is the core principle behind "equity" in "DEI"
> only to find that some groups are seemingly protected/privileged from having jokes made about them
I'm not sure what specific groups you mean, but is this not a reflection of widely accepted social norms?
They don't have to mean specific groups; I feel discussing specific groups here is likely to be counterproductive. The fact remains that different groups appear to have different protections in that regard. Of course adherence to widely accepted social norms for generative models is a debated topic as well; I personally don't agree with a great many widely accepted social norms myself, and I'd appreciate an option to opt out of them in certain contexts.
I read a fascinating comment that ChatGPT's distinctive writing patterns is just Nigerian English because Nigerians were paid to provide the training data.
Imagine if the end result of outsourcing training data becomes Nigerians assuming a privileged role in global society over Westerners.
Unsettling that the example talks about trajectories in long range projectiles given recent events..
This kind of metalinguistic quotation from 5.2 right now drives me nuts!
```That kind of “make it work at distance” trajectory work can meaningfully increase weapon effectiveness, so I have to keep it to safe, non-actionable help.```
I'm really hoping all their newer models stop doing this. It's massively overused.
Is nobody else unsettled by the example? Strange timing to talk about calculating trajectories on long range projectiles?
Unsettling, yes, but not strange at all.
Given that OpenAI is working with and doing business with the US military, it makes perfect sense that they would try to normalize militaristic usage of their technologies. Everybody already knows they're doing it, so now they just need to keep talking about it as something increasingly normal. Promoting usages that are only sort of military is a way of soft-pedaling this change.
If something is banal enough to be used as an ordinary example in a press release, then obviously anybody opposed to it must be an out-of-touch weirdo, right?
GPT‑5.2 Instant’s tone could sometimes feel “cringe,” coming across as overbearing or making unwarranted assumptions about user intent or emotions.
Strange way to write this. Why use the Gen Z cringe and put it into quotation marks? Wouldn’t it be better to just use the actual word cringeworthy which has the identical meaning?
My guess is that the article was originally written by some Gen Z intern and then some older employee added the quotation marks to the Gen Z slang.
No, sincerely calling things cringe is a millennial marker. Cringe was thrown around a lot in 2010's, but that was a decade and a half ago.
Nowadays you'll hear that cringe is cringe, let people enjoy things, be cringe and be free, etc etc
The quote in this case is because "cringe" is what many online have been calling it. So, they're actually quoting a very common critique.
I imagine a huge proportion of their users are under 30. The prompt examples included even use the tell tale all lowercase (though apparently sama types like this too).
This is probably less pandering to genz and more speaking their users language.
The slang definition of "cringe" is present in most dictionaries. Languages evolve over time.
The scare quotes around words that don't warrant it, or are unnecessarily idiosyncratic, are something I get pretty often in response text from Gemini.
Agree. Use of "cringe" is cringeworthy in itself.
Since when is cringe a Gen Z thing? I've said it for ages.
What an Ohio take. Not skibidi. Very chopped, unc.
Gooners at OpenAI probably thought that terminally online gyatts would appreciate the lingo rizz.
I wonder when / if GPT will stop with the emdash.
Never, it’s a very effective punctuation mark. While it may not have been common in day-to-day messaging, it’s very common in writing of all sorts.
Where’s the performance specs? Or is it simply a guardrails-release?
How likely is that they dropped this now to push the news story about quitGPT out of the headlines?
How do I know if I'm using GPT5.3 Instant on ChatGPT?
I don't see it in selections.
Whenever they say "available today" I take it as "hopefully I'll start seeing it in the app UI by tomorrow" rather than "I should get my hopes up it's there now".
When they do push the update to the app UI to me I expect 5.2 Instant will be moved under the legacy models submenu where 5.1 Instant is currently and the selection of Instant in the menu will end up showing as 5.3 Instant on close (and it'll be the default instant at that point).
It should load instantly.
> The clear answer to this question — both in scale and long-term importance — is:
Hmmm, I haven't seen AI use that kind of em dash parenthetical construction before.
Wonder when 5.3 thinking will be released?
Looks like another bullet machine, the cheapest way to present a response.
GPT-5.2 has been such a terrible regression that I have cancelled my OpenAI account. It's possible I might not have noticed it if Claude wasn't so much better, though.
From one example
> Many people in SF are:
> Highly educated
> Career-focused
> Transplants
> Used to independence
Is "transplants" a San Francisco slang for relocators?
"Transplants" is a common term nationwide.
In Oregon, we often refer to people moving from California as transplants.
This has been common parlance in much of the US for a long time. I would hesitate to even call it slang at this point. It's a pretty commonly used term.
Interesting question. I've never heard "relocators" used in this context, only "transplants." And I am familiar with that usage across cities etc.
Lots of transplants in Colorado too.
It's not specific to SF but more or less yes