9 ms·

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

by Flux159 7mo ago

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.

TrainedMonkey 7mo ago
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.
tedsanders 7mo ago
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.)
- JCharante 7mo ago
  are they really two models? are they available via the API or are they wrappers built on top of models available via the API?
- lxgr 7mo ago
  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.
- seejayseesjays 7mo ago
  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.
  - idiotsecant 7mo ago
    none granted.
- lifis 7mo ago
  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.
  - michaelmrose 7mo ago
    Wouldn't this be 1.5x as expensive?
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      Not if the Instant answer is sufficient.
      - resters 7mo ago
        That's assuming that the instant answer is even directionally correct. A misleading instant answer could pollute the context and lead the thinking model astray.
        ssl-3 7mo ago
        Can the context of the pre-revision, Instant response be simply be discarded -- or forked or branched or [insert appropriate nomenclature here] -- instead of being included as potential poison? (It seems absurd that to consider that there may be no undo button that the machine can push.)
        resters 7mo ago
        I'm sure it could, that is probably how it should work. In many cases it would be fine without that.
- mrcwinn 7mo ago
  Do your fully autonomous offensive weapons and domestic surveillance systems use Instant?
  - Computer0 7mo ago
    Not today, but response time would be a lot better if they did.
- Flux159 7mo ago
  Thanks for clarifying! I guess the default for most users is going to be to use the router / auto switcher which is fine since most people won't change the default. Just noting that I'm not against differentiation in products, but it gets very confusing for users when there's too many options (in the case of the consumer ChatGPT at least this is still more limited than in pre-GPT 5 days). The issue is that there's differentiation at what I pay monthly (free vs plus vs pro) and also at the model layer - which essentially becomes this matrix of different options / limits per model (and we're not even getting into capabilities). For someone who uses codex as well, there are 5 models there when I use /model (on Plus plan, spark is only available for Pro plan users), limits also tied to my same consumer ChatGPT plan. I imagine the model differentiation is only going to get worse as well since with more fine tuned use cases, there will be many different models (ie health care answers, etc.) - is it really on the user to figure out what to use? The only saving grace is that it's not as bad as Intel or AMD cpu naming schemes / cloud provider instance naming, but that's a very low bar.
- merlindru 7mo ago
  but why not have "sane defaults but configurable"? hide away the extra complexity for everyone. give power users a way to get it back.
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    The model doesn't even need to be exposed in the UI. Let the user specify "use model foobar-4" or "use a coding model" or "use a middle-tier attorney model". VIM does this well: no UI, magic incantations to use features.
- vessenes 7mo ago
  By the way, I imagine you know this, but the product split is not obvious, even to my 20-something kids that are Plus subscribers - I saw one of them chatting with the instant model recently and I was like "No!! Never do that!!" and they did not understand they were getting the (I'm sorry to say) much less capable model. I think it's confusing enough it's a brand harm. I offer no solutions, unfortunately. I guess you could do a little posthoc analysis for plus subscribers on up and determine if they'd benefit from default Thinking mode; that could be done relatively cheaply at low utilization times. But maybe you need this to keep utilization where it's at -- either way, I think it ends up meaning my kids prefer Claude. Which is fine; they wouldn't prefer Haiku if it was the default, but they don't get Haiku, they get Sonnet or Opus.
  - pants2 7mo ago
    I agree -- we're on the ChatGPT Enterprise plan at work and every time someone complains about it screwing up a task it turns out they were using the instant model. There needs to be a way to disable it at the bare minimum.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  - sebmellen 7mo ago
    I mean, they must know this. Imagine how many tokens they're saving.
- xiphias2 7mo ago
  Is there a way to get sticky model selection back, or the reason is that it is just too expensive to serve alternative models? For coding I love codex-5.3-xhigh, but for non-coding prompts I still far prefer o3 even if it's considered a legacy model. I can imagine that its higher tool use is too expensive to serve, but as a pro user I would love it to come back.
- redox99 7mo ago
  Auto will never work, because for the exact same prompt sometimes you want a quick answer because it's not something very important to you, and sometimes you want the answer to be as accurate as possible, even if you have to wait 10 minutes. In my case it would be more useful to have a slider of how much I'm willing to wait. For example instant, or think up to 1 minute, or think up to 15 minutes.
  - cj 7mo ago
    They have an "answer now" button that stops the reasoning and starts the reply. Same with Gemini.
    - redox99 7mo ago
      Yeah I use that, but it's not really a solution that allows to only have auto. It doesn't help when it chooses Instant instead of Thinking, and it's also much slower than using Instant outright because the Skip button doesn't immediately show, and it's generally slow to restart.
  - nearbuy 7mo ago
    That's pretty close to what they have. They just named them Instant, Thinking (Standard), and Thinking (Extended), and they're discrete presets instead of a slider.
    - redox99 7mo ago
      But the time it takes is too variable. Even standard can sometimes take 15+ minutes.
- bananaflag 7mo ago
  Before GPT-5 was launched, and after sama had said they would unify the ordinary and reasoning models, I think we all expected more than an (auto-)switcher, we expected some small innovation (smaller than the ordinary-to-reasoning one, but still a significant one) that would make both kinds of replies be in a way generated by a single model (don't know exactly how, I expected OpenAI to surprise us with something that would feel obvious in retrospect).
- discardable_dan 7mo ago
  How's the war effort?
NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
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.
- mrits 7mo ago
  Are you not vibe coding in girlfriend mode?
- kilroy123 7mo ago
  I can't fathom using LLMs like this. Does ChatGPT actually do this? I thought people who were into this stuff used dedicated apps or Grok?
  - bananaflag 7mo ago
    https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTNSFW/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTNSFW/
  - Sabinus 7mo ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
josalhor 7mo ago
Reminder that OpenAI serves a lot of customers for free, most of the people I know use the free tier. There is a big limit on thinking queries on free tier, so a decent non thinking model is probably a positive ROI for them.
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
It's because people like choice and control, and "5.2" vs "5.2 thinking" is confusing. Making them "5.2 instant" and "5.2 thinking" is less confusing to more people. Their competitors already do this (Gemini 3 Fast & Gemini 3 Thinking).
- Terretta 7mo ago
  ChatGPT 5.2 Intuitive ChatGPT 5.2 Ponderous “I had this dream the other night…” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYIbMwswKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYIbMwswKM
az226 7mo ago
Instant is a traditional LLM (non-reasoning). Thinking is a reasoning model. The name instant isn’t “instant” lol.

by Flux159 7mo ago

TrainedMonkey 7mo ago

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.

tedsanders 7mo ago

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.)

JCharante 7mo ago
are they really two models? are they available via the API or are they wrappers built on top of models available via the API?
lxgr 7mo ago
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.
seejayseesjays 7mo ago
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.
- idiotsecant 7mo ago
  none granted.
lifis 7mo ago
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.
- michaelmrose 7mo ago
  Wouldn't this be 1.5x as expensive?
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    Not if the Instant answer is sufficient.
    - resters 7mo ago
      That's assuming that the instant answer is even directionally correct. A misleading instant answer could pollute the context and lead the thinking model astray.
      - ssl-3 7mo ago
        Can the context of the pre-revision, Instant response be simply be discarded -- or forked or branched or [insert appropriate nomenclature here] -- instead of being included as potential poison? (It seems absurd that to consider that there may be no undo button that the machine can push.)
        resters 7mo ago
        I'm sure it could, that is probably how it should work. In many cases it would be fine without that.
mrcwinn 7mo ago
Do your fully autonomous offensive weapons and domestic surveillance systems use Instant?
- Computer0 7mo ago
  Not today, but response time would be a lot better if they did.
Flux159 7mo ago
Thanks for clarifying! I guess the default for most users is going to be to use the router / auto switcher which is fine since most people won't change the default. Just noting that I'm not against differentiation in products, but it gets very confusing for users when there's too many options (in the case of the consumer ChatGPT at least this is still more limited than in pre-GPT 5 days). The issue is that there's differentiation at what I pay monthly (free vs plus vs pro) and also at the model layer - which essentially becomes this matrix of different options / limits per model (and we're not even getting into capabilities). For someone who uses codex as well, there are 5 models there when I use /model (on Plus plan, spark is only available for Pro plan users), limits also tied to my same consumer ChatGPT plan. I imagine the model differentiation is only going to get worse as well since with more fine tuned use cases, there will be many different models (ie health care answers, etc.) - is it really on the user to figure out what to use? The only saving grace is that it's not as bad as Intel or AMD cpu naming schemes / cloud provider instance naming, but that's a very low bar.
merlindru 7mo ago
but why not have "sane defaults but configurable"? hide away the extra complexity for everyone. give power users a way to get it back.
- dotancohen 7mo ago
  The model doesn't even need to be exposed in the UI. Let the user specify "use model foobar-4" or "use a coding model" or "use a middle-tier attorney model". VIM does this well: no UI, magic incantations to use features.
vessenes 7mo ago
By the way, I imagine you know this, but the product split is not obvious, even to my 20-something kids that are Plus subscribers - I saw one of them chatting with the instant model recently and I was like "No!! Never do that!!" and they did not understand they were getting the (I'm sorry to say) much less capable model. I think it's confusing enough it's a brand harm. I offer no solutions, unfortunately. I guess you could do a little posthoc analysis for plus subscribers on up and determine if they'd benefit from default Thinking mode; that could be done relatively cheaply at low utilization times. But maybe you need this to keep utilization where it's at -- either way, I think it ends up meaning my kids prefer Claude. Which is fine; they wouldn't prefer Haiku if it was the default, but they don't get Haiku, they get Sonnet or Opus.
- pants2 7mo ago
  I agree -- we're on the ChatGPT Enterprise plan at work and every time someone complains about it screwing up a task it turns out they were using the instant model. There needs to be a way to disable it at the bare minimum.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- sebmellen 7mo ago
  I mean, they must know this. Imagine how many tokens they're saving.
xiphias2 7mo ago
Is there a way to get sticky model selection back, or the reason is that it is just too expensive to serve alternative models? For coding I love codex-5.3-xhigh, but for non-coding prompts I still far prefer o3 even if it's considered a legacy model. I can imagine that its higher tool use is too expensive to serve, but as a pro user I would love it to come back.
redox99 7mo ago
Auto will never work, because for the exact same prompt sometimes you want a quick answer because it's not something very important to you, and sometimes you want the answer to be as accurate as possible, even if you have to wait 10 minutes. In my case it would be more useful to have a slider of how much I'm willing to wait. For example instant, or think up to 1 minute, or think up to 15 minutes.
- cj 7mo ago
  They have an "answer now" button that stops the reasoning and starts the reply. Same with Gemini.
  - redox99 7mo ago
    Yeah I use that, but it's not really a solution that allows to only have auto. It doesn't help when it chooses Instant instead of Thinking, and it's also much slower than using Instant outright because the Skip button doesn't immediately show, and it's generally slow to restart.
- nearbuy 7mo ago
  That's pretty close to what they have. They just named them Instant, Thinking (Standard), and Thinking (Extended), and they're discrete presets instead of a slider.
  - redox99 7mo ago
    But the time it takes is too variable. Even standard can sometimes take 15+ minutes.
bananaflag 7mo ago
Before GPT-5 was launched, and after sama had said they would unify the ordinary and reasoning models, I think we all expected more than an (auto-)switcher, we expected some small innovation (smaller than the ordinary-to-reasoning one, but still a significant one) that would make both kinds of replies be in a way generated by a single model (don't know exactly how, I expected OpenAI to surprise us with something that would feel obvious in retrospect).
discardable_dan 7mo ago
How's the war effort?

NitpickLawyer 7mo ago

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.

mrits 7mo ago
Are you not vibe coding in girlfriend mode?
kilroy123 7mo ago
I can't fathom using LLMs like this. Does ChatGPT actually do this? I thought people who were into this stuff used dedicated apps or Grok?
- bananaflag 7mo ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTNSFW/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTNSFW/
- Sabinus 7mo ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

josalhor 7mo ago

Reminder that OpenAI serves a lot of customers for free, most of the people I know use the free tier. There is a big limit on thinking queries on free tier, so a decent non thinking model is probably a positive ROI for them.

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

It's because people like choice and control, and "5.2" vs "5.2 thinking" is confusing. Making them "5.2 instant" and "5.2 thinking" is less confusing to more people. Their competitors already do this (Gemini 3 Fast & Gemini 3 Thinking).

Terretta 7mo ago
ChatGPT 5.2 Intuitive ChatGPT 5.2 Ponderous “I had this dream the other night…” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYIbMwswKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYIbMwswKM

az226 7mo ago

Instant is a traditional LLM (non-reasoning). Thinking is a reasoning model. The name instant isn’t “instant” lol.