OpenAI o3 and o4-mini

As a consumer, it is so exhausting keeping up with what model I should or can be using for the task I want to accomplish.

I’m assuming when you say “read once”, that implies reading once every single release?

It’s confusing. If I’m confused, it’s confusing. This is UX 101.

It's becoming a bit like iphone 3, 4... 13, 25...

Ok they are all phones that run apps and have a camera. I'm not an "AI power user", but I do talk to ChatGPT + Grok for daily tasks and use copilot.

The big step function happened when they could search the web but not much else has changed in my limited experience.

Some people don't blindly trust the marketing department of the publisher

This one seems to make it easier — if the promises here hold true, the multi-modal support probably makes o4-mini-high OpenAI's best model for most tasks unless you have time and money, in which case it's o3-pro.

Then it doesn't even matter what they name the model since it's just marketing that they wouldn't trust anyway.

I think it can be confusing if you're just reading the news. If you use ChatGPT, the model selector has good brief explanations and teaching you about newly available options if you don't visit the dropdown. Anthropic does similarly.

"good at advanced reasoning", "fast at advanced reasoning", "slower at advanced reasoning but more advanced than the good one but not as fast but cant search the internet", "great at code and logic", "good for everyday tasks but awful at everything else", "faster for most questions but answers them incorrectly", "can draw but cant search", "can search but cant draw", "good for writing and doing creative things"

I asked OpenAI how to choose the right USB cable for my device. Now the objects around me are shimmering and winking out of existence, one by one. Help

This is a very apt analogy.

It confers to the speaker confirmation they're absolutely right - names are arbitrary.

While also politely, implicitly, pointing out the core issue is it doesn't matter to you --- which is fine! --- but it may just be contributing to dull conversation to be the 10th person to say as much.

Putting the actual list would have made it too clear that I'm right I see

As another consumer, I think you're overreacting, it's not that bad.

Lol. But that's nothing. Wait until you shimmer and wink in and out of existence, like llms do during each completion

Aside from anything else, having one model called o4 and one model called 4o is confusing. And I know they haven't released o4 yet but still.

Gemini 2.5 Pro for every single task was the meta until this release. Will have to reassess now.

Huh. I use Gemini 2.0 Flash for many things because it's several times faster than 2.5 Pro.

how do you deal with the fact that they use all of your data for training their own systems and review all conversations

Agreed.

I pretty much stopped shopping around once Gemini 2.0 Flash came out.

For general, cloud-centric software development help, it does the job just fine.

I'm honestly quite fond of this Gemini model. I feel silly saying that, but it's true.

The answer is to just use the latest Claude model and not worry beyond that.

It feels like all the AI companies are pulling the versions out of their arse at the moment, I think they should work backwards and work to AGI 1.0

So my guess currently is that most are lingering at about 0.3

Yes, this one is addictive for its speed and I like how Google was clever and also offered it in a powerful reasoning edition. This helps offset deficiencies from being smaller while still being cheap. I also find it quite sufficient for my kind of coding. I only pull out 2.5 Pro on larger and complex code bases that I think might need deeper domain specific knowledge beyond the coding itself.

gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 is the paid version which doesn't use your data

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#data-use-paid

Mad tangent, but as an old timey MtG player it’s always jarring when someone uses “the meta” not to refer to the particular dynamics of their competitive ecosystem but to a single strategy within it. Impoverishes the concept, I feel, even in this case where I don’t actually think a single model is best at everything.

I do not feel like I can trust the empire that was built off selling personal data.

Make no mistake, I doubt the other options are trustworthy too.

I'm a World of Warcraft & Dota 2 player, using "the meta" in that way is pretty common in gaming these days I think. The "meta" is still the 'metagame' in the competitive ecosystem sense, but it also refers to strategies that are considered flavor of the month (FOTM) or just generally safe bets.

So there's "the meta", and there's "that strategy is meta", or "that strategy is the meta."

We'll know they have cracked AGI when they solve the hardest problem of all - naming things

Personally, I frankly do not care for most things. But for more sensitive things which might land me in trouble, local models are the way to go.

Yeah, I accept that "Nash equilibrium" isn't likely to catch on at this stage.