> isn't sycophantic

Not sure about that one... But I think the true secret sauce for all these models is how they reason. GPT never outputs how it thinks, which "saves on tokens" but Claude absolutely tells you how it thinks, and there's people who use how it reasons about solving problems to finetune smaller open source models, with surprisingly better output.

From my experience, it has not been sycophantic in the sense that it pushes back and questions my own reasoning in healthy ways. There were moments where I felt I was brushing up against actual AI psychosis, and it pushed back on my questioning of its intentions, that it even had intentions. I'll put it this way: I feel comfortable recommending Claude to people who haven't experienced AI yet. As we've learned from early experiences with other models, leading people down paths of believing they understood math in ways nobody else has and even harming themselves, I put Claude as a safer alternative.