I must be crazy, because I clearly remember chatgpt 4 being downgraded before they released 4o, and I felt it was a worse model with a different label, I even choose the old chatgpt 4 when they would give me the option. I canceled my subscription around that time.

Nah that rings a bell. 4o for me was the beginning of the end - a lot faster, but very useless for my purposes [1][2]. 4 was a very rocky model even before 4o, but shortly after the 4o launch it updated to be so much worse, and I cancelled my subscription.

[1] I’m not saying it was a useless model for everyone, just for me.

[2] I primarily used LLMs as divergent thinking machines for programming. In my experience, they all start out great at this, then eventually get overtrained and are terrible at this. Grok 3 when it came out had this same magic; it’s long gone now.

Not crazy. 4o was a hallucination machine. 4o had better “vibes” and was really good at synthesizing information in useful ways, but GPT-4 Turbo was a bigger model with better world knowledge.