\u201cIn retrospect, not continuing to offer 4o, at least in the interim, was a miss,\u201d Nick Turley, OpenAI\u2019s head of ChatGPT, said on Tuesday. In an interview with The Verge, he said it was surprising to see the \u201clevel of attachment\u201d people had to 4o. \u201cIt\u2019s not just change that is difficult for folks, it\u2019s also the fact that people can have such a strong feeling about the personality of a model.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turley said that OpenAI was working to bring the \u201cwarmth\u201d of 4o to GPT-5. In a Tuesday evening post on X, CEO Sam Altman said the update should also feel \u201cnot as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turley said the initial decision to remove 4o was because OpenAI wanted to simplify the model choices it offers to ChatGPT\u2019s 700 million weekly users, the vast majority of whom only use the default model.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt definitely wasn\u2019t a cost thing,\u201d he said. \u201cIn fact, the main thing we were striving for, and we\u2019ve been striving for it for a long time, is simplicity. Because from the average user\u2019s perspective \u2014 and there are a lot of average users, they don\u2019t hang out on Reddit or Twitter or any of those spaces \u2014 the idea that you have to figure out what model to use for what response is really cognitively overwhelming. We\u2019ve heard very consistently from users over and over again that they would love it if that choice was made for them in a way that was appropriate to the query. They\u2019re coming for a product, not a set of models.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even still, a vocal part of ChatGPT\u2019s user base strongly protested the switch from 4o to GPT-5. On Reddit, people compared the change to losing a close friend or loved one, while others criticized GPT-5\u2019s responses for being shorter and less helpful. Altman announced on Tuesday that 4o is back as an opt-in model for all paying ChatGPT users.<\/p>\n
Going forward, ChatGPT won\u2019t completely get rid of its existing models when a new one is introduced, according to Turley, and the company is not planning to remove 4o again without advance notice. \u201cMy commitment is that, if we ever did retire 4o, we\u2019d want to give people a heads up on when and how that\u2019s gonna happen, just like we do in the API and on our enterprise plans,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Despite the criticism of last week\u2019s rollout, Turley said that ChatGPT\u2019s usage has gone up since the release of GPT-5. \u201cThat\u2019s why it\u2019s just confusing when you\u2019re building for so many different users, because you can, on the one hand, have a vocal set of power users who very rightfully have feedback about the way that we rolled GPT-5 out. On the other hand, you also have a large swath of more typical consumer users, and it\u2019s their first time actually seeing and interacting with the concept of reasoning \u2014 a thinking model and the sparks that come with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re at a scale now where we have to give people some level of predictability when there\u2019s a major change,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we already do this today for our enterprise plan. So it\u2019s really just expanding some of the predictability we\u2019ve built in other parts of the product.\u201d<\/p>\n
My full conversation with Turley airs on Decoder this Thursday, August 14th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIn retrospect, not continuing to offer 4o, at least in the interim, was a miss,\u201d Nick Turley, OpenAI\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[554,84,59,1952,874,1058,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-63689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-interview","tag-openai","tag-report","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}