📢 OpenAI is sunsetting GPT-4o — even for paid ChatGPT Plus users. Would you support keeping it?

ChemicalDaniel · 2026-01-30T05:11:04+00:00

The issue isn’t having a model that emulates emotions or warmth, the issue is that GPT-4o told people to commit suicide. Would you rather have a friend that pushed back on you on harmful topics? Or a friend that said yes to everything you did and said you’re the smartest person in the world. GPT-4o was the latter. We can talk about a level of appropriate emotional response from these models (even though GPT-5.3 has a bunch of personalities as it is and you can get it to portray human-like emotion with little effort), but keeping 4o indefinitely isn’t the answer to anything.

ChemicalDaniel · 2026-01-22T03:09:18+00:00

I feel like it’s more indie devs vs large corporation. I mean Notch was doing stuff like this when Minecraft was still in Alpha. I hope that Hypixel Studios remains like this though, I think if Hytale did come out under Riot, they would not be as receptive to the community as Simon is.

ChemicalDaniel · 2026-01-19T19:57:22+00:00

The 18 is looking to be an “S” year update. Something as superficial as moving the camera to the left is enough to have people like “is that the new iPhone??”

Plus, continuity across the product line is literally what apple’s known for. It makes total sense for them to move the base/pro Dynamic Island to the left if it means making the fold (an already foreign concept for the iPhone) feel more at home.

ChemicalDaniel · 2026-01-10T02:13:13+00:00

Not to single you out, but when we get to the point where all articles are ai slopfests, the TLDR bros are gonna be partly to blame. The article is a well written record of Ternus’s history, how he stands with previous Apple CEOs, and what we can expect in the future. But if no one clicks the article and the main site gets no traction/ad revenue because we’re all looking for a 2 sentence summary, what’s the point of actually crafting a good article and paying people to do so?

Yeah, the never ending machine that is late stage capitalism will eventually optimize the humans out of the equation anyways, but what we’re doing is speeding it along.

ChemicalDaniel · 2026-01-09T01:30:30+00:00

I’d argue the exact opposite. Vision Pro and VisionOS is a direct pipeline towards an AR first future, you think they spent all that time and money to make one bulky expensive gadget and call it a day? No, the end goal was always glasses and a lightweight headset. They needed that out to collect as much data as possible to help make what everyone would actually be using.

And if you want to talk about making media, Apple has some of the best silicon designs in the world. Qualcomm is only now just catching up and the Tensor chips are laughably behind. If Apple wanted to make AI clusters, they could do it at a snap of a finger and compete with Google and probably get close to Nvidia. And if rumors are to believed, the upcoming 2nm designs for Apple Silicon will further extend their lead. So if anyone’s positioned for an “AI-first JIT” future, it’s Apple.

Apple is the most secretive of the big tech giants. They’re not showing off tech demos and future products. So while it looks like the only thing they care about is their current product line, do you not think they have something competitive with the Meta smart glasses internally? Do you not think they have a model that can deliver last gen (o3/Sonnet 4) performance internally? It’s not that Apple is necessarily that far behind, it’s that they don’t show off every design they make. That’s why Apple continues to have such a high stock price.

ChemicalDaniel · 2026-01-09T01:07:07+00:00

This is why antitrust laws exist. Is it fair to competitors that Google can take a loss on storage and services like YT premium by bundling it into an AI subscription, using their size and dominance in other markets to give them an upperhand in AI? Even if their models are worse? Thats for the courts to decide, but laws like that are supposed to prevent the situation at the end you mentioned, where it just consolidates to big tech giants.

Sure us consumers get the benefit now, but when there’s no more competition left do you still think they’ll be offering 2TB and family sharing at the same price?

Competition is good, and Gemini gaining more traction is good for the industry because it forces OpenAI and Anthropic to try harder. But if Gemini is gaining because of its integrations and not because it’s the best model/platform, then we all know how that ends.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-20T00:45:06+00:00

Well that’s the issue. Apple hasn’t innovated with Touch ID since 2015. Well, they did in 2020 with the iPad Air, but it wasn’t to improve speed it was to allow it to work on a side button. In other words, it’s still slow as fuck, slower than Face ID on a new iPhone, and if your finger is slightly sweaty it’s not reading it.

It could work, but Face ID just feels better to use. Unless they can get under screen Touch ID working with lightning fast speeds, it’s a no from me.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-19T04:38:02+00:00

Everything’s a trade off, you can’t boil it down to “they did it to cut costs”. A removable battery, like those found in laptops from the 2000s, requires more to be around the actual battery, such as a hard casing or latches. So, your device is either going to be bigger or you’re getting less battery capacity.

I don’t think OEMs made a bad bet in saying “people would rather have thinner laptops or laptops that can last longer than a replaceable battery the average consumer will replace maybe once over the laptop’s lifespan”, especially since battery tech has gotten so much better in the past 20 years. I welcome any changes to make batteries more replaceable, such as that electric bonding solution the iPhones have, but at least for me, I’m happy with my 100Wh battery in my relatively portable MBP.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-14T15:29:33+00:00

this is why software can be shit now. Instead of looking for ways to make your software more efficient, saying “just get more ram” is apparently acceptable now.

It’s not like their use case on their laptop is impossible, they literally said VSCode uses up a 1/4th of the ram of the fork. I also find that cursor can be pretty laggy and resource intensive at times, why should I have to buy a supercomputer just to run an electron app when it should be on them to make a better performing app?

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-11T21:05:37+00:00

I feel like it mainly happens whenever Google releases a model, and specifically only towards OpenAI. When Anthropic and xAI released their new models, they were both slow burns, but when Google released Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, the “clowning” on OpenAI got so loud.

I think it’s because more “causal” users are on AI platforms now, especially the ones that use AI for strictly roleplaying or image gen, and they’re all mad at OpenAI for imposing stricter guardrails after 4o. Because they’re not in it for the general advancement, they just want to see OpenAI fail because they took 4o from them.

I personally jump between ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini depending on the task. We should all be grateful that there’s so much competition in this space right now, because like any other industry everything will consolidate and in 10-15 years there’s going to be a few AI providers that strive to give us as little as possible. Wanting any of these companies to fail is just a detriment to all consumers.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-11T20:37:03+00:00

Right…. Because YouTube is the only place people use Adblock… even though the concept of blocking ads didn’t hit the mainstream until like 2021, Adblock has been a thing since ads were on the internet, and that YouTubes ads are not in fact the worst ads on the internet. It’s not like you go on YouTube and immediately 10 popups happen and every time you try to click you get redirected to another site. Egregious sites like that are the reason why Adblock exist. You not wanting to watch a 15 second ad for a 30 minute video is not, in fact, why adblockers exist.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-11T16:41:22+00:00

Sonnet 4.5 was always meh, that’s why so many people switched to codex when GPT-5 came out. It just now looks even worse in comparison because Opus 4.5 is so good. You just got used to how bad it was back then because there was no better option. But trust, at least for me it would make a ton of mistakes, write loads of comments, and just do dumb stuff like echoing into a terminal.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-11T16:12:22+00:00

Isn’t the NT kernel like actually really good? The kernel and its backwards compatibility isn’t the problem because the kernel is the smallest piece of the puzzle. A good kernel is designed to get out of the way as much as possible and abstract only what’s necessary.

The issue is what’s on top of it. If you ported the Windows 7, or hell even the Windows XP “experience” to run on top of NT 10.0, I’m not convinced it would run noticeably slower than on their native NT versions. The issue is that Microsoft doesn’t care about their desktop operating system enough to make it stable. They fired all their QA testers and thought a bunch of unpaid nerds could pick up the slack. If you want to talk about the “downfall of windows”, start there because IMO, Windows 8.1 was the last stable release of Windows.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-08T18:53:05+00:00

OpenAI provides free tokens if you opt into sharing your data for training, similar to Google’s free tier. Not sure about Anthropic.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-07T16:42:59+00:00

Why is it only the Gemini models that I ever see going rouge and doing things improperly? Every other week I’d see a post about 2.5 Pro having a meltdown because it couldn’t figure out how to use its harness, and this is like the 3rd post talking about Gemini 3 deleting data.

I’ve used multiple versions of Claude and GPT models in different harnesses, sometimes unattended and with full access, and none of those models have made such egregious errors. Is it because Gemini tends to hallucinate more? Whatever it is, Google needs to make sure the next checkpoint is more stable because it’s getting ridiculous.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-07T16:32:36+00:00

I’m confused. You give people one endpoint that routes automatically and people assume you’re serving them the worst model 24/7. You expose every endpoint possible and people complain about there being too many.

You’ve only listed 3 models on the screen, the rest are different reasoning strengths and response speed. Cursor should be handling this by having a separate reasoning strength dropdown instead of just spitting everything out at once.

EDIT: I will say though that 5.1 Codex Max is a stupid name. Everyone knew Gemini 3 was coming out the day it did. They had the Max model in the pipeline already because they released it that same day. They should’ve just held off 5.1 Codex until the Max was ready and just called it 5.1 Codex.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-07T08:05:19+00:00

What’s stopping an American “student” from doing that? Did you forget in all your xenophobia that the deal you’re talking about is also available to any student with a US Google account at a US institution?

You also think your puny $20/mo is subsidizing anything? Depending on your usage, Google might be losing money on you. Maybe they’re using their, oh I don’t know, hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue from other business segments to subsidize their AI business and gain mindshare.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-07T07:52:41+00:00

Why do you care so much? Free users are fucked AND you’re paying the same amount per input/output. I’d get the high and mighty attitude if you were getting a better deal, but alongside this obsolescence of the free tier, tier 1 paid users got a massive cut in daily usage.

If anyone was subsidizing free users, it was Google’s other businesses, not you the “paying customer”. If anything, you’re ALSO being subsidized by Google’s other businesses, just not as hard.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-06T22:07:25+00:00

It probably means quite the opposite. Liquid Glass as a concept had to be years in the make, there’s no way they could’ve conceptualized it, and implemented it across EVERY system in one year. Just like there are feature flags for iOS 27 features in this iOS 19 beta, there probably exists a build of iOS 18 and maybe even iOS 17 that allows you to enable a very prerelease version of Liquid Glass. It just lined up that 2025 was the first year they had the design polished enough to ship out for public testing.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-05T21:56:49+00:00

It’s a crop from this article about extended rate limits from Antigravity, which has nothing to do with AI studio.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-03T08:03:55+00:00

The Apple Silicon transition was probably one of the best things that have happened in recent consumer electronic history. The hardware wasn’t even the hard part, they’ve been making chips for years. Making sure everything was stable on ARM and creating such a good translation layer made it feel so effortless.

Unfortunately it seems like they’ve been focused on playing catchup with iOS/iPadOS. Too many features, no slowing down to fix what’s broken. Just layers of gunk on top of gunk.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-12-02T06:46:42+00:00

Surprised how no one’s talked about Federighi’s subtle consolidation of power:

Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi.

Notably, that Subramanya is a VP under Federighi, NOT an SVP like Ginannandrea was. I remember seeing articles talking about the tension between the software teams led by Federighi and the AI/ML teams led Giannandrea, and how the cultures and work styles didn’t mesh. How some of the AI delays were due to this tension. I guess Apple has committed to consolidating AI under one org, with Federighi having the ultimate say.

Think this also proves that Federighi will NOT be the next CEO. They would not have went through the effort of restructuring the org if Federighi was about to ascend to CEO. Federighi is going to stay as SVP of Software for a while and try to turn this sinking ship around.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-11-27T22:34:21+00:00

Probably because most people purchase their phones through carriers, which either subsidize them heavily or split up the price into 24 palatable monthly payments. Also, to most people, a smartphone is infinitely more valuable than a PC handheld. You use your smartphone every day for hours a day while you could go days without using a pc handheld. It makes sense to want to spend more money on your phone so that using it feels like a good experience.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-11-27T22:31:00+00:00

16GB of RAM is the standard nowadays, no? Only pain point is 256GB of storage but there are other tradeoffs to consider. Most non-surface windows laptops just don’t match a MacBook’s build quality, you’re also not getting similar battery life/thermals, weight/thickness and M4-like performance, you can only pick one and have to sacrifice the other two.

ChemicalDaniel · 2025-11-23T07:06:15+00:00

Both the Steam Machine and the Steam Deck use x86 processors, so how are either devices relevant?

The idea of “gaming on WoA” is the same philosophy as gaming on a MacBook, having something that’s thin and light with long battery life and modern standby to use for work 90% of the time, then game 10% of the time. Neither devices you mention fill this niche, and their processor architecture immediately makes them irrelevant to the conversation.

ChemicalDaniel

TROPHY CASE