Friday, 8th August 2025
The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
I’ve been dipping into the r/ChatGPT subreddit recently to see how people are reacting to the GPT-5 launch, and so far the vibes there are not good. This AMA thread with the OpenAI team is a great illustration of the single biggest complaint: a lot of people are very unhappy to lose access to the much older GPT-4o, previously ChatGPT’s default model for most users.
[... 860 words]GPT-5 rollout updates:
- We are going to double GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users as we finish rollout.
- We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o. We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for.
- GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often.
- We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query.
- We will change the UI to make it easier to manually trigger thinking.
- Rolling out to everyone is taking a bit longer. It’s a massive change at big scale. For example, our API traffic has about doubled over the past 24 hours…
We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback. As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!
Hypothesis is now thread-safe (via) Hypothesis is a property-based testing library for Python. It lets you write tests like this one:
from hypothesis import given, strategies as st @given(st.lists(st.integers())) def test_matches_builtin(ls): assert sorted(ls) == my_sort(ls)
This will automatically create a collection of test fixtures that exercise a large array of expected list and integer shapes. Here's a Gist demonstrating the tests the above code will run, which include things like:
[]
[0]
[-62, 13194]
[44, -19562, 44, -12803, -24012]
[-7531692443171623764, -109369043848442345045856489093298649615]
Hypothesis contributor Liam DeVoe was recently sponsored by Quansight to add thread safety to Hypothesis, which has become important recently due to Python free threading:
While we of course would always have loved for Hypothesis to be thread-safe, thread-safety has historically not been a priority, because running Hypothesis tests under multiple threads is not something we see often.
That changed recently. Python---as both a language, and a community---is gearing up to remove the global interpreter lock (GIL), in a build called free threading. Python packages, especially those that interact with the C API, will need to test that their code still works under the free threaded build. A great way to do this is to run each test in the suite in two or more threads simultaneously. [...]
Nathan mentioned that because Hypothesis is not thread-safe, Hypothesis tests in community packages have to be skipped when testing free threaded compatibility, which removes a substantial battery of coverage.
Now that Hypothesis is thread-safe another blocker to increased Python ecosystem support for free threading has been removed!
I have a toddler. My biggest concern is that he doesn't eat rocks off the ground and you're talking to me about ChatGPT psychosis? Why do we even have that? Why did we invent a new form of insanity and then charge people for it?
— @pearlmania500, on TikTok