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- Hacker News
- > Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We’re introducing updates to ChatGPT that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for Free users.
My mission is world conquest. I'm writing a comment on an HN thread.
No, those two clauses have no relation whatsoever. I just felt like saying the first sentence because it sounded cool.
- They are communicating that they have reached AGI in order to create a trail of documentation for the Microsoft legal battleby solenoid0937
Guess, Google's AI Mode is chipping away at their consumers (I know I haven't used Chat in a long, long while for 'quick questions and web searches' after OpenAI did away with "think" which I always use). The money-minting office & coding market Anthropic has cornered is hyper-competitive at both the frontier & low-cost ends. OpenAI is reactive [0] and seems right up against it, despite the strength of its excellent models.Every week, 1 billion people turn to ChatGPT for everything from quick questions and web searches to planning, research, advice, and complex decisions.[0] Won't put it past OpenAI (and/or Google) to open weight larger models!
by ignoramous- You've jumped to a naive conclusionby sk4rekr0w
- Did they do away with think? I think now you have to do it with /think
- Google’s AI has been very glitchy for me lately. I used to reserve chatGPT for serious work and Gemini for daily personalized unimportant things. But now I switched completely to ChatGPT and resigned myself to their memories/personalization.
- $20/month also gives you API access for coding, in any coding agent. I keep hitting the weekly limit but it's a good deal while it lasts.by skybrian
- Nothing in the ChatGPT model release notes yet: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9624314-model-release-no...
(This is a subtle nudge at anyone from OpenAI who reads this to make sure they get updated.)
OpenAI have a model called "chat-latest" - I wonder if that's running this new model yet: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/chat-latest
It's described as "points to the latest Instant model currently used in ChatGPT" - so presumably that's "GPT-5.6 Instant" in the app.
by simonw - It’s not subtle when you point it out - you’re looking for a different phrase entirely.by hluska
- There’s no 5.6 instant I think — 5.6 Luna is gonna be the new instant tier modelby firasd
- free unlimited luna is a pretty badass move
luna is very good
by tosh - Were free users subject to some limits? I've never run into any limits.by msq22
- I guess I should give it another shot because I had pretty bad experience with Luna when it first came out. Stuff Sonnet knew better.by causal
- It's also pretty cheap if you're paying for it (for coding). But I don't quite trust it for anything complicated, so I often use Terra.by skybrian
- Any improvement to the ChatGPT free plan is really nice. It's easy to forget that most people have never used a SOTA model, and only think of their experience with GPT-4o or Google Search's AI Overviews when asked about AI.by timpera
- Its always fun to try to read between the lines here to speculate why they are doing this.
Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.
They might be doing this to improve the messaging of AI among causal users since right now there is a huge amount of datacenter backlash in the US due to AI grievances.
Maybe they have too much excess capacity or they really want to juice token numbers and market share on their dashboards for marketing.
I also wonder if being given access to an actually a decent model like luna with actual thinking budget instead of brainless "instant" modes will start to make causal users understand the real capabilities of these models.
by kingstnap - Is this new behavior from them? I haven't looked at their free chat offering in a minute, but I thought they always had them close behind paid tier, often with essentially equal products that made it weird for them to sell the paid tier for chat.
- > Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.
Definitely this. The recent 80% discount was a reaction to Deepseek's update so that they still position near the frontier. My theory: Luna has always had a much higher efficiency. You do know that the model didn't get faster after the discount?
by simianwords - It's also going to be more training data for them.by deanc
- Let’s speculate: they want luna to be their first model “on silicon” and need as much test data as possible before finalizing the design.by planb
- > Because this version of GPT‑5.6 Sol is optimized for everyday chats, it will only be available in the Chat experience in ChatGPT. The version of GPT‑5.6 Sol that powers Work and Codex is not changing as part of this release.
So same name, and no indication of which "version" you're using except whether you're in "Chat" or "Work"? Why make it so confusing?
by Razengan - They must really be feeling the commoditization pressure. I'm not sure what the way out of this is, ChatGPT and Claude are still good products, but they are not necessarily premium products anymore.
I expect a few things to happen in the next year:
1) Exclusive MCP server deals/API integrations
2) Significant switch to B2B marketing, even moreso than we've seen before, with API interfaces being paid and chat-client interfaces becoming more and more free, perhaps just with limits more on integrations or data visualization/analysis
3) US restrictions on B2B contracts with non-US hosted models that do any sort of contracting with the government
Obviously there's a bunch of stuff I'm not foreseeing. But it really does feel like the bottom of the market is collapsing into free. I assume OpenAI and Anthropic think their next generation of models will restore their halo tier status and that the cash burn is justified to just get there, but this has to really mess up IPO plans.
by colingauvin - I'm not sure I agree
1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you need to pay to use Sol, and you need to pay to use Opus or Fable. It does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna, but the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual users. It would hallucinate non stop.
2) When $100 and $200 per month plans launched, they were received as outrageous even here. Nowadays they are pretty common among power users.
by redox99 - For me on a paid plan, the effort indicator was hidden and the model was 5.5 instant. I had to press the + button to select “think harder” before the dial that allowed Sol medium or high to be selected to show.
It made me wonder how many paid subscribers realize they are using the same 5.5 instant model as free users by default. A dark pattern or oversight?
by aryehof - How many can tell the difference?by maxipoo
- I think thats a difference between Chat and Work. In work mode you can select a model and chat should feel "instant". But I also don't like that differentiation. It's already hard to know which thinking level is necessary, how should users know which mode to use?by krsilas
- And it hides again and reverts to instant when you are away from the app for a while. Definitely annoying.by reed1234
- A lot of users are very latency sensitive. The median ChatGPT.com user is not like the HN community; many of my friends use ChatGPT like it’s the Omnibox in chrome.
I’ve literally seen people ask ChatGPT for a link to Gmail.
Is it a dark pattern, or design decision that makes users happier?
by dannyw - While their math results are impressive, vibe coding their own web UIs with their subpar design models is really going to backfire if their plan is to attract new users with better free model offerings.
The Aug 6 update has forced the entry box to auto-format Markdown in an attempt to imitate Claude. The implementation is buggy and even simple copy-and-paste has gone entirely haywire. They also forgot to leave a switch to turn the confounded autoformatting thing off.
Chat mode in general is currently crawling with more UX bugs than a porch screen in summer.
by saithound - Giving free ChatGPT users access to reasoning (the 'Think' toggle) will have a broader impact on the world than every new paid model and coding agent combined.by heaney-555