The burying of the lede here is insane. $5/$25 per MTok is a 3x price drop from Opus 4. At that price point, Opus stops being "the model you use for important things" and becomes actually viable for production workloads.
Also notable: they're claiming SOTA prompt injection resistance. The industry has largely given up on solving this problem through training alone, so if the numbers in the system card hold up under adversarial testing, that's legitimately significant for anyone deploying agents with tool access.
The "most aligned model" framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting though. Would love to see third-party red team results.
"Warmer and more conversational" - they're basically admitting GPT-5 was too robotic. The real tell here is splitting into Instant vs Thinking models explicitly. They've given up on the unified model dream and are now routing queries like everyone else (Anthropic's been doing this, Google's Gemini too).
Calling it "GPT-5.1 Thinking" instead of o3-mini or whatever is interesting branding. They're trying to make reasoning models feel less like a separate product line and more like a mode. Smart move if they can actually make the router intelligent enough to know when to use it without explicit prompting.
Still waiting for them to fix the real issue: the model's pathological need to apologize for everything and hedge every statement lol.
LeCun, who's been saying LLMs are a dead end for years, is finally putting his money where his mouth is. Watch for LeCun to raise an absolutely massive VC round.
Lol, this reminds me of a funny story. I had a lawyer whose name was Jim Halpert. Turns out he was the very Jim who was inspired his namesake on the office. Asked him about it once. His reply? "Hey, it's been great for getting clients." =)
He was also very much like Jim on the show. Fun times.
Am I the only one who thought this was referring to how people felt about the general zeitgeist? Like, how Romans viewed everyone outside Rome as barbarian, etc. Not in the literal sense like, mirrors. Nice HN switcheroo.
Yeah, this was my first startup and I thought I could multi-task lol. Probably did it for the wrong reason (eg: "checking a box - went hitchhiking in Alaska") than anything else. Spent most of the trip worrying about other) startup shit, didn't enjoy the scenery nearly as much as I should have. Still regret it haha!
So it's not really hallucinating - it correctly represents "seahorse emoji" internally, but that concept has no corresponding token. lm_head just picks the closest thing and the model doesn't realize until too late.
Explains why RL helps. Base models never see their own outputs so they can't learn "this concept exists but I can't actually say it."
Went hitchhiking in Alaska while running my startup to "get a break". Absolute disaster. Couldn't properly connect to internet, dropped a bunch of meetings, etc.
Still worth it. My fault for not planning in advance.
You'd be surprised. America is an incredibly fucked up society. Free meals, Healthcare. Hell, even cheaper tattoos. There is a certain segment of the population where "jail" does not have the same meaning as it does for you or I.
Small anecdote, but back in early 2024 (like, March), I did a ton of searching for an AI helper app that would allow me to use the gemini API key from AI studio. Chatbox was one of only two that I found (can't remember the other), but even back then I was astounded by its functionality and ease of use. It supported a ton of stuff, like custom system prompts, etc. Basically recreated a lot of the lmstudio experience but on a phone.
You'd be surprised, but it was extremely difficult to find an android app that supported API key usage. Ahead of its time.
Lol, tether, bitfinex are examples that came to mind. A lot of the OG crypto instutions got to where they are by "faking it till they made it" long enough to actually make it.
Does no one still remember that tether continually stalled audits FOR YEARS in the face of increasing scrutiny?
One doesn't need to go more than 2 feet into the mire of meme coins before finding the detritus of 6000000 rug pulls. Just that these guys never get prosecuted.
The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.
What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out.
Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol
The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund