Just as a heads up, even though GPT-5.5 is releasing today, the rollout in ChatGPT and Codex will be gradual over many hours so that we can make sure service remains stable for everyone (same as our previous launches). You may not see it right away, and if you don't, try again later in the day. We usually start with Pro/Enterprise accounts and then work our way down to Plus. We know it's slightly annoying to have to wait a random amount of time, but we do it this way to keep service maximally stable.
Did you guys do anything about GPT‘s motivation? I tried to use GPT-5.4 API (at xhigh) for my OpenClaw after the Anthropic Oauthgate, but I just couldn‘t drag it to do its job. I had the most hilarious dialogues along the lines of „You stopped, X would have been next.“ - „Yeah, I‘m sorry, I failed. I should have done X next.“ - „Well, how about you just do it?“ - „Yep, I really should have done it now.“ - “Do X, right now, this is an instruction.” - “I didn’t. You’re right, I have failed you. There’s no apology for that.”
I literally wasn’t able to convince the model to WORK, on a quick, safe and benign subtask that later GLM, Kimi and Minimax succeeded on without issues. Had to kick OpenAI immediately unfortunately.
Get the actual prompt and have Claude Code / Codex try it out via curl / python requests. The full prompt will yield debugging information. You have to set a few parameters to make sure you get the full gpt-5 performance. e.g. if your reasoning budget too low, you get gpt-4 grade performance.
IMHO you should just write your own harness so you have full visibility into it, but if you're just using vanilla OpenClaw you have the source code as well so should be straightforward.
I've had success asking it to specifically spawn a subagent to evaluate each work iteration according to some criteria, then to keep iterating until the subagent is satisfied.
I never saw that happen in Codex so there's a good chance that OpenClaw does something wrong. My main suspicion would be that it does not pass back thinking traces.
Gone are the days of deterministic programming, when computers simply carried out the operator’s commands because there was no other option but to close or open the relays exactly as the circuitry dictated. Welcome to the future of AI; the future we’ve been longing for and that will truly propel us forward, because AI knows and can do things better than we do.
I had this funny moment when I realized we went full circle...
"INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.[7]"
Isn’t this the optimal behavior assuming that at times the service is compute-limited and that you’re paying less per token (flat fee subscription?) than some other customers? They would be strongly motivated to turn a knob to minimize tokens allocated to you to allow them to be allocated to more valuable customers.
well, I do understand the core motivation, but if the system prompt literally says “I am not budget constrained. Spend tokens liberally, think hardest, be proactive, never be lazy.” and I’m on an open pay-per-token plan on the API, that’s not what I consider optimal behavior, even in a business sense.
GPT 5.4 is really good at following precise instructions but clearly wouldn't innovate on its own (except if the instructions clearly state to innovate :))
Conceivably you could have a public-facing dashboard of the rollout status to reduce confusion or even make it visible directly in the UI that the model is there but not yet available to you. The fanciest would be to include an ETA but that's presumably difficult since it's hard to guess in case the rollout has issues.
Congrats on the release! Is Images 2.0 rolling out inside ChatGPT as well, or is some of the functionality still going to be API/Playground-only for a while?
OpenAI has been very generous with limit resets. Please don't turn this into a weird expectation to happen whenever something unrelated happens. It would piss me off if I were in their place and I really don't want them to stop.
The suggestion wasn't about general limit resets when there is bugs or outages, but commercially useful to let users try new models when they have already reached their weekly limits.
Sorry but why should we care if very reasonable suggestions "piss [them] off"? That sounds like a them problem. "Them" being a very wealthy business. I think OpenAI will survive this very difficult time that GP has put them through.
Hmm. Any idea why it's so much worse than the other ones you have posted lately? Even the open weight local models were much better, like the Qwen one you posted yesterday.
what is your setup for drawing pelican? Do you ask model to check generated image, find issues and iterate over it which would demonstrate models real abilities?
Note the Local Messages between 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5. And, yes, I did read the linked article and know they're claiming that 5.5's new efficient should make it break-even with 5.4, but the point stands, tighter limits/higher prices.
For API usage, GPT-5.5 is 2x the price of GPT-5.4, ~4x the price of GPT-5.1, and ~10x the price of Kimi-2.6.
Unfortunately I think the lesson they took from Anthropic is that devs get really reliant and even addicted on coding agents, and they'll happily pay any amount for even small benefits.
I feel like devs generally spend someone else's money on tokens. Either their employers or OpenAIs when they use a codex subscription.
If I put on my schizo hat. Something they might be doing is increasing the losses on their monthly codex subscriptions, to show that the API has a higher margin than before (the codex account massively in the negative, but the API account now having huge margins).
I've never seen an OpenAI investor pitch deck. But my guess is that API margins is one of the big ones they try to sell people on since Sama talks about it on Twitter.
I would be interested in hearing the insider stuff. Like if this model is genuinely like twice as expensive to serve or something.
Yeah and the increase in operating expenses is going to make managers start asking hard questions - this is good. It means eventually there will be budgets put in place - this will force OAI and Anthropic to innovate harder. Then we will see how things pan out. Ultimately a firm is not going to pay rent to these firms if the benefits dont exceed the costs.
Sometimes I wonder if innovation in the AI space has stalled and recent progress is just a product of increased compute. Competence is increasing exponentially[1] but I guess it doesn't rule it out completely. I would postulate that a radical architecture shift is needed for the singularity though
> that devs get really reliant and even addicted on coding agents
An alternative perspective is, devs highly value coding agents, and are willing to pay more because they're so useful. In other words, the market value of this limited resource is being adjusted to be closer to reality.
Maybe that's true. But I think part of the issue is that for a lot of things developers want to do with them now— certainly for most of the things I want to do with them— they're either barely good enough, or not consistently good enough. And the value difference across that quality threshold is immense, even if the quality difference itself isn't.
On top of that I noticed just right now after updating macos dekstop codex app, I got again by default set speed to 'fast' ('about 1.5x faster with increased plan usage'). They really want you to burn more tokens.
>For API developers, gpt-5.5 will soon be available in the Responses and Chat Completions APIs at $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, with a 1M context window.
A playable 3D dungeon arena prototype built with Codex and GPT models. Codex handled the game architecture, TypeScript/Three.js implementation, combat systems, enemy encounters, HUD feedback, and GPT‑generated environment textures. Character models, character textures, and animations were created with third-party asset-generation tools
The game that this prompt generated looks pretty decent visually. A big part of this likely due to the fact the meshes were created using a seperate tool (probably meshy, tripo.ai, or similiar) and not generated by 5.5 itself.
It really seems like we could be at the dawn of a new era similiar to flash, where any gamer or hobbyist can generate game concepts quickly and instantly publish them to the web. Three.js in particular is really picking up as the primary way to design games with AI, in spite of the fact it's not even a game engine, just a web rendering library.
FWIW I've been experimenting with Three.js and AI for the last ~3 years, and noticed a significant improvement in 5.4 - the biggest single generation leap for Three.js specifically. It was most evident in shaders (GLSL), but also apparent in structuring of Three.js scenes across multiple pages/components.
It still struggles to create shaders from scratch, but is now pretty adequate at editing existing shaders.
In 5.2 and below, GPT really struggled with "one canvas, multiple page" experiences, where a single background canvas is kept rendered over routes. In 5.4, it still takes a bit of hand-holding and frequent refactor/optimisation prompts, but is a lot more capable.
Excited to test 5.5 and see how it is in practice.
Not just games. I have a hobby project where I want to build my own processor. I like the circuit design part. But I'm not keen on having to write a cross-assembler.
I’ve had a lot of success using LLMs to help with my Three.js based games and projects. Many of my weird clock visualizations relied heavily on it.
It might not be a game engine, but it’s the de facto standard for doing WebGL 3D. And since it’s been around forever, there’s a massive amount of training data available for it.
Before LLMs were a thing, I relied more on Babylon.js, since it’s a bit higher level and gives you more batteries included for game development.
The meshes look interesting, but the gameplay is very basic. The tank one seems more sophisticated with the flying ships and whatnot.
What's strange is that this Pietro Schirano dude seems to write incredibly cargo cult prompts.
Game created by Pietro Schirano, CEO of MagicPath
Prompt: Create a 3D game using three.js. It should be a UFO shooter where I control a tank and shoot down UFOs flying overhead.
- Think step by step, take a deep breath. Repeat the question back before answering.
- Imagine you're writing an instruction message for a junior developer who's going to go build this. Can you write something extremely clear and specific for them, including which files they should look at for the change and which ones need to be fixed?
-Then write all the code. Make the game low-poly but beautiful.
- Remember, you are an agent: please keep going until the user's query is completely resolved before ending your turn and yielding back to the user. Decompose the user's query into all required sub-requests and confirm that each one is completed. Do not stop after completing only part of the request. Only terminate your turn when you are sure the problem is solved. You must be prepared to answer multiple queries and only finish the call once the user has confirmed they're done.
- You must plan extensively in accordance with the workflow steps before making subsequent function calls, and reflect extensively on the outcomes of each function call, ensuring the user's query and related sub-requests are completely resolved.
I do not see instructions to assist in task decomposition and agent ~"motivation" to stay aligned over long periods as cargo culting.
See up thread for anecdotes [1].
> Decompose the user's query into all required sub-requests and confirm that each one is completed. Do not stop after completing only part of the request. Only terminate your turn when you are sure the problem is solved.
I see this as a portrayal of the strength of 5.5, since it suggests the ability to be assigned this clearly important role to ~one shot requests like this.
I've been using a cli-ai-first task tool I wrote to process complex "parent" or "umberella" into decomposed subtasks and then execute on them.
This has allowed my workflows to float above the ups and downs of model performance.
That said, having the AI do the planning for a big request like this internally is not good outside a demo.
Because, you want the planning of the AI to be part of the historical context and available for forensics due to stalls, unwound details or other unexpected issues at any point along the way.
Everyone talked about the marketing stunt that was Anthropic's gated Mythos model with an 83% result on CyberGym. OpenAI just dropped GPT 5.5, which scores 82% and is open for anybody to use.
I recommend anybody in offensive/defensive cybersecurity to experiment with this. This is the real data point we needed - without the hype!
Never thought I'd say this but OpenAI is the 'open' option again.
The real 'hype' was that the oh-snap realization that Open AI would absolutely release a competitive model to Mythos within weeks of Anthropic announcing there's, and that Sam would not gate access to it. So the panic was that the cyber world had only a projected 2 weeks to harden all these new zero days before Sam would inevitably create open season for blackhats to discover and exploit a deluge of zero-days.
Anything that even vaguely smells like security research, reverse engineering or similar "dual-use" application hits the guardrails hard and fast. "Hey codex, here is our codebase, help us find exploitable issues" gives a "I can't help you with that, but I'm happy to give you a vague lecture on memory safety or craft a valgrind test harness"
The more interesting part of the announcement than "it's better at benchmarks":
> To better utilize GPUs, Codex analyzed weeks’ worth of production traffic patterns and wrote custom heuristic algorithms to optimally partition and balance work. The effort had an outsized impact, increasing token generation speeds by over 20%.
The ability for agentic LLMs to improve computational efficiency/speed is a highly impactful domain I wish was more tested than with benchmarks. From my experience Opus is still much better than GPT/Codex in this aspect, but given that OpenAI is getting material gains out of this type of performancemaxxing and they have an increasing incentive to continue doing so given cost/capacity issues, I wonder if OpenAI will continue optimizing for it.
There's already KernelBench which tests CUDA kernel optimizations.
On the other hand all companies know that optimizing their own infrastructure / models is the critical path for ,,winning'' against the competition, so you can bet they are serious about it.
Honestly the problem with these is how empirical it is, how someone can reproduce this? I love when Labs go beyond traditional benchies like MMLU and friends but these kind of statements don't help much either - unless it's a proper controlled study!
In a sense it's better than a benchmark: it's a practical, real-world, highly quantifiable improvement assuming there are no quality regressions and passes all test cases. I have been experimenting with this workflow across a variety of computational domains and have achieved consistent results with both Opus and GPT. My coworkers have independently used Opus for optimization suggestions on services in prod and they've led to much better performance (3x in some cases).
A more empirical test would be good for everyone (i.e. on equal hardware, give each agent the goal to implement an algorithm and make it as fast as possible, then quantify relative speed improvements that pass all test cases).
Oh, come on, if they do well on benchmarks people question how applicable they are in reality. If they do well in reality people complain that it's not a reproducible benchmark...
I'm conflicted whether I should keep my Claude Max 5x subscription at this point and switch back to GPT/Codex... anyone else in a similar position? I'd rather not be paying for two AI providers and context switching between the two, though I'm having a hard time gauging if Claude Code is still the "cream of the crop" for SWE work. I haven't played around with Codex much.
This is 3x the price of GPT-5.1, released just 6 months ago. Is no one else alarmed by the trend? What happens when the cheaper models are deprecated/removed over time?
SOTA models get distilled to open source weights in ~6 months. So paying premium for bleeding edge performance sounds like a fair compensation for enormous capex.
This seems huge for subscription customers. Looking at the Artificial Analysis numbers, 5.5 at medium effort yields roughly the intelligence as 5.4 (xhigh) while using less than a fifth the tokens.
As long as tokens count roughly equally towards subscription plan usage between 5.5 & 5.4, you can look at this as effectively a 5x increase in usage limits.
As someone who always leaves intelligence at default, and am ok with existing models, should I be shifting gears more manually as providers sell us newer models? Is medium or lower better than free/cheaper models?
I've found myself so deeply embedded in the Claude Max subscription that I'm worried about potentially makign a switch. How are people making sure they stay nimble enough not to get trarpped by one company's ecosystem over another? For what it's worth, Opus 4.7 has not been a step up and it's come with an enormously higher usage of the subscription Anthropic offers making the entire offering double worse.
It's surprisingly simple to switch. I mean both products offer basically identical coding CLI experiences. Personally I've been paying for Claude max $100, and ChatGPT $20, and then just using ChatGPT to fill in the gaps. Specifically I like it for code review and when Claude is down.
Coding models are effectively free. They are capable of making money and supporting themselves given access to the right set of things. That is what I do
I have a directory of skills that I symlink to Codex/Claude/pi. I make scripts that correspond with them to do any heavy lifting, I avoid platform specific features like Claude's hooks. I also symlink/share a user AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md
MCPs aren't as smooth, but I just set them up in each environment.
Except for history, I don’t find much that stops you from switching back and forth on the CLI. They both use tools, each has a different voice, but they both work. Have it summarize your existing history into a markdown file, and read it in with any engine.
The APIs are pretty interchangeable too. Just ask to convert from one to the other if you need to.
> Across all three evals, GPT‑5.5 improves on GPT‑5.4’s scores while using fewer tokens.
Yeah, this was the next step. Have RLVR make the model good. Next iteration start penalising long + correct and reward short + correct.
> CyberGym 81.8%
Mythos was self reported at 83.1% ... So not far. Also it seems they're going the same route with verification. We're entering the era where SotA will only be available after KYC, it seems.
Isn't Mythos limited to a selected group of companies/organizations Anthropic chose themselves? If the OpenAI announcement for GPT-5.5 is accurate the "trusted cyber access" just requires an open, seemingly straightforward identity verification step.
> We are expanding access to accelerate cyber defense at every level. We are making our cyber-permissive models available through Trusted Access for Cyber , starting with Codex, which includes expanded access to the advanced cybersecurity capabilities of GPT‑5.5 with fewer restrictions for verified users meeting certain trust signals (opens in a new window) at launch.
> Broad access is made possible through our investments in model safety, authenticated usage, and monitoring for impermissible use. We have been working with external experts for months to develop, test and iterate on the robustness of these safeguards. With GPT‑5.5, we are ensuring developers can secure their code with ease, while putting stronger controls around the cyber workflows most likely to cause harm by malicious actors.
> Organizations who are responsible for defending critical infrastructure can apply to access cyber-permissive models like GPT‑5.4‑Cyber, while meeting strict security requirements to use these models for securing their internal systems.
"GPT‑5.4‑Cyber" is something else and apparently needs some kind of special access, but that CyberGym benchmark result seems to apply to the more or less open GPT-5.5 model that was just released.
This model is great at long horizon tasks, and Codex now has heartbeats, so it can keep checking on things. Give it your hardest problem that would take hours with verifiable constraints, you will see how good this is:)
If GPT-5.5 Pro really was Spud, and two years of pretraining culminated in one release, WOW, you cannot feel it at all from this announcement. If OpenAI wants to know why they like they’ve fallen behind the vibes of Anthropic, they need to look no further than their marketing department. This makes everything feel like a completely linear upgrade in every way.
Clearly they felt a big backlash when version 5 was released. Now they are afraid of another response like this. And effectively, for the user it will likely only be a small update.
I can argue that disaster started mid-4.6, when they started juggling with rate limits while hitting uptime problems. Great we have some healthy competition and waiting for the next move from Deepmind.
How does this work exactly? Is there like a "search online" tool that the harness is expected to provide? Or does the OpenAI infra do that as part of serving the response?
I've been working on building my own agent, just for fun, and I conceptually get using a command line, listing files, reading them, etc, but am sort of stumped how I'm supposed to do the web search piece of it.
Given that they're calling out that this model is great at online research - to what extent is that a property of the model itself? I would have thought that was a harness concern.
I’ve noticed when writing little bedtime stories that require specific research (my kids like Pokemon stories and they’ve been having an episodic “pokemon adventure” with them as the protagonists) ChatGPT has done a fantastic job of first researching the moves the pokemon have, then writing the actual story. The only mistake it consistently makes is when I summarize and move from a full context session, it thinks that Gyarados has to swim and is incapable of flying.
It definitely seems like it does all the searching first, with a separate model, loads that in, then does the actual writing.
It's literally a distinct model with a different optimisation goal compared to normal chat. There's a ton of public information around how they work and how they're trained
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index eval for example, in order to hit a score of 57%, Opus 4.7 takes ~5x as many output tokens as GPT-5.5, which dwarfs the difference in per-token pricing.
The token differential varies a lot by task, so it's hard to give a reliable rule of thumb (I'm guessing it's usually going to be well below ~5x), but hope this shows that price per task is not a linear function of price per token, as different models use different token vocabularies and different amounts of tokens.
We have raised per-token prices for our last couple models, but we've also made them a lot more efficient for the same capability level.
yes but as far as i know gpt tokenizer is about the same as opus 4.6's, where 4.7 is seeing something in the ballpark of a 30% increase. this should still be cheaper even disregarding the concerns around 4.7 thinking burning tokens
For less than 10% bump across the benchmarks? Probably not, but if your employer is paying (which is probably what OAI is counting on) it's all good.
It's kind of starting to make sense that they doubled the usage on Pro plans - if the usage drains twice as fast on 5.5 after that promo is over a lot of people on the $100 plan might have to upgrade.
You are paying per token, but what you care about is token efficiency. If token efficiency has improved by as much as they claim it did (i.e. you need less tokens to complete a task successfully) all seems well.
Tbf, I have not super kept track of what is actually happening inside the "thinking" portion of recent releases. But last time I checked there still was a lot of verbosity and mistakes, that beat the actual amount of required, usable code generation by a wide margin.
Well, sort of. Imagine the case where it first scans the repo, then "intelligently" creates architecture files describing the project.
The level of intelligence will create a varying quality of summary, with varying need of deep-scans on subsequent sessions. Level of intelligence will also increase comprehension of these architecture files.
Same principle applies when designing plans for complex tasks, etc. Token amount to grasp a concept is what matters.
This happens with every new model release though. The model makes less mistakes and spends less time fixing them, resulting in a token usage reduction for the same difficulty of task. Almost any task other than straight boilerplate will benefit from this.
In the same vein, I would guess that Opus 4.7 is probably cheaper for most tasks than 4.6, even though the tokenizer uses more tokens for the same length of string.
Maybe you'll have better luck but our team just cannot use Opus 4.7.
Some say it goes off on endless tangents, others that it doesn't work enough. Personally, it acts, talks, and makes mistakes like GPT models, for a much more exorbitant price. Misses out on important edge cases, doesn't get off its ass to do more than the bare minimum I asked (I mention an error and it fixes that error and doesn't even think to see if it exists elsewhere and propose fixing it there).
I've slowly been moving to GPT5.4-xhigh with some skills to make it act a bit more like Opus 4.6, in case the latter gets discontinued in favour of Opus 4.7.
I hope the industry starts competing more on highest scores with lowest tokens like this. It's a win for everybody. It means the model is more intelligent, is more efficient to inference, and costs less for the end user.
So much bench-maxxing is just giving the model a ton of tokens so it can inefficiently explore the solution space.
Chip costs strongly impact the economics of model serving.
It is entirely plausible to me that Opus 4.7 is designed to consume more tokens in order to artificially reduce the API cost/token, thereby obscuring the true operating cost of the model.
I agree though, I chose poor phrasing originally. Better to say that GB200 vs Tranium could contribute to the efficiency differential.
Good job on the release notice. I appreciate that it isn't just marketing fluff, but actually includes the technical specs for those of us who care and not concentrated in coding agents only.
I hope GPT 5.5 Pro is not cutting corners and neuter from the start, you got the compute for it not to be.
Looking at the space/game/earthquake tracker examples makes me hopeful that OpenAI is going to focus a bit more on interface visual development/integration from tools like Figma. This is one area where Anthropic definitely reigns supreme.
GPT is really great, but I wish the GPT desktop app supported MCP as well.
You can kind of use connectors like MCP, but having to use ngrok every time just to expose a local filesystem for file editing is more cumbersome than expected.
Benchmarks are favorable enough they're comparing to non-OpenAI models again. Interesting that tokens/second is similar to 5.4. Maybe there's some genuine innovation beyond bigger model better this time?
It's behind Opus 4.7 in SWE-Bench Pro, if you care about that kind of thing. It seems on-trend, even though benchmarks are less and less meaningful for the stuff we expect from models now.
Yay. 5.4 was a frustrating model - moments of extreme intelligence (I liked it very much for code review) - but also a sort of idiocy/literalism that made it very unsuited for prompting in a vague sense. I also found its openclaw engagement wooden and frustrating. Which didn’t matter until anthropic started charging $150 a day for opus for openclaw.
Anyway - these benchmarks look really good; I’m hopeful on the qualitative stuff.
After 5.1, we haven’t seen a -codex-max model, presumably because the benefits of the special training gpt-5.1-codex-max got to improve long context work filtered into gpt-5.2-codex, making the variant no longer necessary (my personal experience accords with this). I’ve been using gpt-5.4 in Codex since it came out, it’s been great. I’ve never back-to-back tested a version against its -codex variant to figure out what the qualitative difference is (this would take a long time to get a really solid answer), but I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point the general-purpose model no longer needs whatever extra training the -codex model gets and they just stop releasing them.
I thought it was weird that for almost the entire 5.3 generation we only had a -codex model, I presume in that case they were seeing the massive AI coding wave this winter and were laser focused on just that for a couple months. Maybe someday someone will actually explain all of this.
Very impressive! Interesting how all other benchmarks it seems to surpass Opus 4.7 except SWE-Bench Pro (Public). You would think that doing so well at Cyber, it would naturally possess more abilities there. Wonder what makes up the actual difference there
> GPT‑5.5 improves on GPT‑5.4’s scores while using fewer tokens.
This might be great if it translates to agentic engineering and not just benchmarks.
It seems some of the gains from Opus 4.6 to 4.7 required more tokens, not less.
Maybe more interesting is that they’ve used codex to improve model inference latency. iirc this is a new (expectedly larger) pretrain, so it’s presumably slower to serve.
With Opus it’s hard to tell what was due to the tokenizer changes. Maybe using more tokens for the same prompt means the model effectively thinks more?
I am still using Codex 5.3 and haven't switched to GPT 5.4 as I don't like the 'its automatic bro trust us', so wondering is Codex going to get these specific releases at all in the future.
Seems like a continuation of the current meta where GPT models are better in GPT-like ways and Claude models are better in Claude-like ways, with the differences between each slightly narrowing with each generation. 5.5 is noticeably better to talk to, 4.7 is noticeably more precise. Etc etc.
This is frankly exciting, outside of the politics of it all, it always feel great to wake up and a new model being released, I personally will stay awake quite long tonight if GPT-5.5 drop in codex.
I'd really like to see improvements like these:
- Some technical proof that data is never read by open ai.
- Proof that no logs of my data or derived data is saved.
etc...
Depends in goals. For long free-firm discussions I find Opus 4.7 Adaptive better/deeper than Opus 4.6 Extended. But usual caveats apply: first week of use and token budget seems generous now on Max 5X.
Cursor is what I daily-drive. 4.7 has been terrible for my mostly python-driven work (whereas Opus 4.6 was literally revolutionary to me). Our frontend folks are also complaining.
Surprised to see SWE-Bench Pro only a slight improvement (57.7% -> 58.6%) while Opus 4.7 hit 64.3%. I wonder what Anthropic is doing to achieve higher scores on this - and also what makes this test particular hard to do well in compared to Terminal Bench (which 5.5 seemed to have a big jump in)
There's an asterisk right below that table stating that:
> *Anthropic reported signs of memorization on a subset of problems
And from the Anthropic's Opus 4.7 release page, it also states:
> SWE-bench Verified, Pro, and Multilingual: Our memorization screens flag a subset of problems in these SWE-bench evals. Excluding any problems that show signs of memorization, Opus 4.7’s margin of improvement over Opus 4.6 holds.
I am sceptical. The generation after 4o models have become crappier and crappier. Hope this one changes the trend. 5.4 is unusable for complex coding work.
... sigh. I realize there's little that can be done about this, but I just got through a real-world session determining of Opus 4.7 is meaningfully better than Opus 4.6 or GPT 5.4, and now there's another one to try things with. These benchmark results generally mean little to me in practice.
Nice to see them openly compare to Opus-4.7… but they don’t compare it against Mythos which says everything you need to know.
The LinkedIn/X influencers who hyped this as a Mythos-class model should be ashamed of themselves, but they’ll be too busy posting slop content about how “GPT-5.5 changes everything”.
I doubt this is representative of real world usage. There is a difference between a few turns on a web chatbot, vs many-turn cli usage on a real project.
It's possible that "smarter" AI won't lead to more productivity in the economy. Why?
Because software and "information technology" generally didn't increase productivity over the past 30 years.
This has been long known as Solow's productivity paradox. There's lots of theories as to why this is observed, one of them being "mismeasurement" of productivity data.
But my favorite theory is that information technology is mostly entertainment, and rather than making you more productive, it distracts you and makes you more lazy.
AI's main application has been information space so far. If that continues, I doubt you will get more productivity from it.
If you give AI a body... well, maybe that changes.
> "information technology" generally didn't increase productivity
Do you think it'd be viable to run most businesses on pen and paper? I'll give you email and being able to consume informational websites - rest is pen and paper.
Productivity metrics were better when businesses were run on just pen and paper. Of course, there could be many confounding factors, but there are also many reasons why this could be so. Just a few hypotheses:
- Pen and paper become a limiting factor on bureaucratic BS
- Pen and paper are less distracting
- Pen and paper require more creative output from the user, as opposed to screens which are mostly consumptive
Its quite possible the use of LLMs means that we are using less effort to produce the same output. This seems good.
But the less effort exertion also conditions you to be weaker, and less able to connect deeply with the brain to grind as hard as once did. This is bad.
Which effect dominates? Difficult to say.
Of course this is absolutely possible. Ultimately there was a time where physical exertion was a thing and nobody was over-weight. That isn't the case anymore is it.
It's a hypothesis that "smarter" AI models, ie GPT-5.5, may not be a great boon to productivity. Given that this is the raison d'etre of AI models, and improving them, I don't see why it is any less useful than any other discussion.
(I work at OpenAI.)
I literally wasn’t able to convince the model to WORK, on a quick, safe and benign subtask that later GLM, Kimi and Minimax succeeded on without issues. Had to kick OpenAI immediately unfortunately.
IMHO you should just write your own harness so you have full visibility into it, but if you're just using vanilla OpenClaw you have the source code as well so should be straightforward.
Can you point to some online resources to achieve this? I'm not very sure where I'd begin with.
"INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.[7]"
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL
The UI tells you which model you're using at any given time.
Please don't.
And that backdoor API has GPT-5.5.
So here's a pelican: https://gist.github.com/simonw/edda1d98f7ba07fd95eeff473cb16...
I used this new plugin for LLM: https://github.com/simonw/llm-openai-via-codex
https://hcker.news/pelican-low.svg
https://hcker.news/pelican-medium.svg
https://hcker.news/pelican-high.svg
https://hcker.news/pelican-xhigh.svg
Someone needs to make a pelican arena, I have no idea if these are considered good or not.
Edit: this one has crossed legs lol
https://developers.openai.com/codex/pricing?codex-usage-limi...
Note the Local Messages between 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5. And, yes, I did read the linked article and know they're claiming that 5.5's new efficient should make it break-even with 5.4, but the point stands, tighter limits/higher prices.
Unfortunately I think the lesson they took from Anthropic is that devs get really reliant and even addicted on coding agents, and they'll happily pay any amount for even small benefits.
If I put on my schizo hat. Something they might be doing is increasing the losses on their monthly codex subscriptions, to show that the API has a higher margin than before (the codex account massively in the negative, but the API account now having huge margins).
I've never seen an OpenAI investor pitch deck. But my guess is that API margins is one of the big ones they try to sell people on since Sama talks about it on Twitter.
I would be interested in hearing the insider stuff. Like if this model is genuinely like twice as expensive to serve or something.
[1]https://arxiv.org/html/2503.14499v1* *Source is from March 2025 so make of it what you will.
An alternative perspective is, devs highly value coding agents, and are willing to pay more because they're so useful. In other words, the market value of this limited resource is being adjusted to be closer to reality.
>For API developers, gpt-5.5 will soon be available in the Responses and Chat Completions APIs at $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, with a 1M context window.
The game that this prompt generated looks pretty decent visually. A big part of this likely due to the fact the meshes were created using a seperate tool (probably meshy, tripo.ai, or similiar) and not generated by 5.5 itself.
It really seems like we could be at the dawn of a new era similiar to flash, where any gamer or hobbyist can generate game concepts quickly and instantly publish them to the web. Three.js in particular is really picking up as the primary way to design games with AI, in spite of the fact it's not even a game engine, just a web rendering library.
It still struggles to create shaders from scratch, but is now pretty adequate at editing existing shaders.
In 5.2 and below, GPT really struggled with "one canvas, multiple page" experiences, where a single background canvas is kept rendered over routes. In 5.4, it still takes a bit of hand-holding and frequent refactor/optimisation prompts, but is a lot more capable.
Excited to test 5.5 and see how it is in practice.
Oh just like a real developer
An hour or so with Claude Code and https://paste.c-net.org/ParmesanControl
It might not be a game engine, but it’s the de facto standard for doing WebGL 3D. And since it’s been around forever, there’s a massive amount of training data available for it.
Before LLMs were a thing, I relied more on Babylon.js, since it’s a bit higher level and gives you more batteries included for game development.
What's strange is that this Pietro Schirano dude seems to write incredibly cargo cult prompts.
I do not see instructions to assist in task decomposition and agent ~"motivation" to stay aligned over long periods as cargo culting.
See up thread for anecdotes [1].
> Decompose the user's query into all required sub-requests and confirm that each one is completed. Do not stop after completing only part of the request. Only terminate your turn when you are sure the problem is solved.
I see this as a portrayal of the strength of 5.5, since it suggests the ability to be assigned this clearly important role to ~one shot requests like this.
I've been using a cli-ai-first task tool I wrote to process complex "parent" or "umberella" into decomposed subtasks and then execute on them.
This has allowed my workflows to float above the ups and downs of model performance.
That said, having the AI do the planning for a big request like this internally is not good outside a demo.
Because, you want the planning of the AI to be part of the historical context and available for forensics due to stalls, unwound details or other unexpected issues at any point along the way.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47879819
*BELIEVE!* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2CRtES2K3E
What is this, 2023?
I feel like this was generated by a model tapping in to 2023 notions of prompt engineering.
I recommend anybody in offensive/defensive cybersecurity to experiment with this. This is the real data point we needed - without the hype!
Never thought I'd say this but OpenAI is the 'open' option again.
Neither the release post, nor the model card seems to indicate anything like this?
> To better utilize GPUs, Codex analyzed weeks’ worth of production traffic patterns and wrote custom heuristic algorithms to optimally partition and balance work. The effort had an outsized impact, increasing token generation speeds by over 20%.
The ability for agentic LLMs to improve computational efficiency/speed is a highly impactful domain I wish was more tested than with benchmarks. From my experience Opus is still much better than GPT/Codex in this aspect, but given that OpenAI is getting material gains out of this type of performancemaxxing and they have an increasing incentive to continue doing so given cost/capacity issues, I wonder if OpenAI will continue optimizing for it.
On the other hand all companies know that optimizing their own infrastructure / models is the critical path for ,,winning'' against the competition, so you can bet they are serious about it.
A more empirical test would be good for everyone (i.e. on equal hardware, give each agent the goal to implement an algorithm and make it as fast as possible, then quantify relative speed improvements that pass all test cases).
F5
As long as tokens count roughly equally towards subscription plan usage between 5.5 & 5.4, you can look at this as effectively a 5x increase in usage limits.
MCPs aren't as smooth, but I just set them up in each environment.
The APIs are pretty interchangeable too. Just ask to convert from one to the other if you need to.
Yeah, this was the next step. Have RLVR make the model good. Next iteration start penalising long + correct and reward short + correct.
> CyberGym 81.8%
Mythos was self reported at 83.1% ... So not far. Also it seems they're going the same route with verification. We're entering the era where SotA will only be available after KYC, it seems.
https://openai.com/index/scaling-trusted-access-for-cyber-de...
"GPT‑5.4‑Cyber" is something else and apparently needs some kind of special access, but that CyberGym benchmark result seems to apply to the more or less open GPT-5.5 model that was just released.Seems so to me - see GPT-5.4[1] and 5.2[2] announcements.
Might be an tacit admission of being behind.
[1] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-4/ [2] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2/
*I work at OAI.
How does this work exactly? Is there like a "search online" tool that the harness is expected to provide? Or does the OpenAI infra do that as part of serving the response?
I've been working on building my own agent, just for fun, and I conceptually get using a command line, listing files, reading them, etc, but am sort of stumped how I'm supposed to do the web search piece of it.
Given that they're calling out that this model is great at online research - to what extent is that a property of the model itself? I would have thought that was a harness concern.
It definitely seems like it does all the searching first, with a separate model, loads that in, then does the actual writing.
(same input price and 20% more output price than Opus 4.7)
However, I do want to emphasize that this is per token, not per task.
If we look at Opus 4.7, it uses smaller tokens (1-1.35x more than Opus 4.6) and it was also trained to think longer. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index eval for example, in order to hit a score of 57%, Opus 4.7 takes ~5x as many output tokens as GPT-5.5, which dwarfs the difference in per-token pricing.
The token differential varies a lot by task, so it's hard to give a reliable rule of thumb (I'm guessing it's usually going to be well below ~5x), but hope this shows that price per task is not a linear function of price per token, as different models use different token vocabularies and different amounts of tokens.
We have raised per-token prices for our last couple models, but we've also made them a lot more efficient for the same capability level.
(I work at OpenAI.)
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/18a02b5d-6b67-4cec-ab64-68cdfbdde...
It's kind of starting to make sense that they doubled the usage on Pro plans - if the usage drains twice as fast on 5.5 after that promo is over a lot of people on the $100 plan might have to upgrade.
Same principle applies when designing plans for complex tasks, etc. Token amount to grasp a concept is what matters.
In the same vein, I would guess that Opus 4.7 is probably cheaper for most tasks than 4.6, even though the tokenizer uses more tokens for the same length of string.
Some say it goes off on endless tangents, others that it doesn't work enough. Personally, it acts, talks, and makes mistakes like GPT models, for a much more exorbitant price. Misses out on important edge cases, doesn't get off its ass to do more than the bare minimum I asked (I mention an error and it fixes that error and doesn't even think to see if it exists elsewhere and propose fixing it there).
I've slowly been moving to GPT5.4-xhigh with some skills to make it act a bit more like Opus 4.6, in case the latter gets discontinued in favour of Opus 4.7.
YMMV, I know.
So much bench-maxxing is just giving the model a ton of tokens so it can inefficiently explore the solution space.
Kimmi 2.6 for example seems to throw more tokens to improve performance (for better or worse)
https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-5-5
The efficiency gap is enormous. Maybe it's the difference between GB200 NVL72 and an Amazon Tranium chip?
It is entirely plausible to me that Opus 4.7 is designed to consume more tokens in order to artificially reduce the API cost/token, thereby obscuring the true operating cost of the model.
I agree though, I chose poor phrasing originally. Better to say that GB200 vs Tranium could contribute to the efficiency differential.
I hope GPT 5.5 Pro is not cutting corners and neuter from the start, you got the compute for it not to be.
You can kind of use connectors like MCP, but having to use ngrok every time just to expose a local filesystem for file editing is more cumbersome than expected.
Will be interesting to try.
Anyway - these benchmarks look really good; I’m hopeful on the qualitative stuff.
I thought it was weird that for almost the entire 5.3 generation we only had a -codex model, I presume in that case they were seeing the massive AI coding wave this winter and were laser focused on just that for a couple months. Maybe someday someone will actually explain all of this.
This might be great if it translates to agentic engineering and not just benchmarks.
It seems some of the gains from Opus 4.6 to 4.7 required more tokens, not less.
Maybe more interesting is that they’ve used codex to improve model inference latency. iirc this is a new (expectedly larger) pretrain, so it’s presumably slower to serve.
I am still using Codex 5.3 and haven't switched to GPT 5.4 as I don't like the 'its automatic bro trust us', so wondering is Codex going to get these specific releases at all in the future.
Since Feb when we got Gemini 3.1, Opus 4.6, and GPT-5.3-Codex we have seen GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 but only Opus 4.7 and no new Gemini model.
Both of these are pretty decent improvements.
https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard/terminal-bench/2.0
I left a comment here with this sentiment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47879896
Soo many unconvincing "I've had access for three weeks and omg it's amazing" takes, it actually primes me for it to be a "meh".
I prefer to see for myself, but the gradual rollout, combined with full-on marketing campaign, is annoying.
Where's the demo link?
> *Anthropic reported signs of memorization on a subset of problems
And from the Anthropic's Opus 4.7 release page, it also states:
> SWE-bench Verified, Pro, and Multilingual: Our memorization screens flag a subset of problems in these SWE-bench evals. Excluding any problems that show signs of memorization, Opus 4.7’s margin of improvement over Opus 4.6 holds.
Also notice how they state just for SWE-Bench Pro: "*Anthropic reported signs of memorization on a subset of problems"
Anyways, still exciting to see more improvements.
The LinkedIn/X influencers who hyped this as a Mythos-class model should be ashamed of themselves, but they’ll be too busy posting slop content about how “GPT-5.5 changes everything”.
https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code
Numbers look too good, wondering if it is benchmaxxed or not
Because software and "information technology" generally didn't increase productivity over the past 30 years.
This has been long known as Solow's productivity paradox. There's lots of theories as to why this is observed, one of them being "mismeasurement" of productivity data.
But my favorite theory is that information technology is mostly entertainment, and rather than making you more productive, it distracts you and makes you more lazy.
AI's main application has been information space so far. If that continues, I doubt you will get more productivity from it.
If you give AI a body... well, maybe that changes.
Do you think it'd be viable to run most businesses on pen and paper? I'll give you email and being able to consume informational websites - rest is pen and paper.
- Pen and paper become a limiting factor on bureaucratic BS
- Pen and paper are less distracting
- Pen and paper require more creative output from the user, as opposed to screens which are mostly consumptive
etc etc
But the less effort exertion also conditions you to be weaker, and less able to connect deeply with the brain to grind as hard as once did. This is bad.
Which effect dominates? Difficult to say.
Of course this is absolutely possible. Ultimately there was a time where physical exertion was a thing and nobody was over-weight. That isn't the case anymore is it.
I have to imagine they'll go to Gemini 3.5 if only for marketing reasons.
Imagine spending 100m on some of these AI “geniuses” and this is the best they can do.
< 5 years until humans are buffered out of existence tbh
may the light of potentia spread forth beyond us
I'm not trying to make any kind of moral statement, but the company just feels toxic to me.