o3 was actually GPT-5. They just gave it a stupid name, and made it impractical for general usage.

But in terms of wow factor, it was a step change on the order of GPT-3 -> GPT-4.

So now they're stuck slapping the GPT-5 label on marginal improvements because it's too awkward to wait for the next breakthrough now.

On that note, o4-mini was much better for general usage (speed and cost). It was my go-to for web search too, significantly better than 4o and only took a few seconds longer. (Like a mini Deep Research.)

Boggles the mind that they removed it from the UI. I'm adding it back to mine right now.

I have acid reflux every time I see the term "step change" used to talk about a model change. There hasn't been any model that has been a "step change" over its predecessor.

It's much more like each new model climbs another step of the ladder that goes up the step, and so far we can't even see the top of the ladder.

My suspicion is also that the ladder actually ends way before it reaches the next step, and LLMs are a dead end. Everything indicates it so far.

Let's not even talk about "reasoning models", aka spend twice the tokens and twice the time on the same answer.