The marquee feature is obviously the 1M context window, compared to the ~200k other models support with maybe an extra cost for generations beyond >200k tokens. Per the pricing page, there is no additional cost for tokens beyond 200k: https://openai.com/api/pricing/
Also per pricing, GPT-5.4 ($2.50/M input, $15/M output) is much cheaper than Opus 4.6 ($5/M input, $25/M output) and Opus has a penalty for its beta >200k context window.
I am skeptical whether the 1M context window will provide material gains as current Codex/Opus show weaknesses as its context window is mostly full, but we'll see.
Yeah, long context vs compaction is always an interesting tradeoff. More information isn't always better for LLMs, as each token adds distraction, cost, and latency. There's no single optimum for all use cases.
For Codex, we're making 1M context experimentally available, but we're not making it the default experience for everyone, as from our testing we think that shorter context plus compaction works best for most people. If anyone here wants to try out 1M, you can do so by overriding `model_context_window` and `model_auto_compact_token_limit`.
Curious to hear if people have use cases where they find 1M works much better!
I too tried Codex and found it similarly hard to control over long contexts. It ended up coding an app that spit out millions of tiny files which were technically smaller than the original files it was supposed to optimize, except due to there being millions of them, actual hard drive usage was 18x larger. It seemed to work well until a certain point, and I suspect that point was context window overflow / compaction. Happy to provide you with the full session if it helps.
How do I override those variables? I’ll give codex another shot with 1M.
I have found a bigger context window qute useful when trying to make sense of larger codebases. Generating documentation on how different components interact is better than nothing, especially if the code has poor test coverage.
I've also had it succeed in attempts to identify some non-trivial bugs that spanned multiple modules.
That's an interesting point regarding context Vs. compaction. If that's viewed as the best strategy, I'd hope we would see more tools around compaction than just "I'll compact what I want, brace yourselves" without warning.
Like, I'd love an optional pre-compaction step, "I need to compact, here is a high level list of my context + size, what should I junk?" Or similar.
> Curious to hear if people have use cases where they find 1M works much better!
Reverse engineering [1]. When decompiling a bunch of code and tracing functionality, it's really easy to fill up the context window with irrelevant noise and compaction generally causes it to lose the plot entirely and have to start almost from scratch.
(Side note, are there any OpenAI programs to get free tokens/Max to test this kind of stuff?)
Do you maybe want to give us users some hints on what to compact and throw away? In codex CLI maybe you can create a visual tool that I can see and quickly check mark things I want to discard.
Sometimes I’m exploring some topic and that exploration is not useful but only the summary.
Also, you could use the best guess and cli could tell me that this is what it wants to compact and I can tweak its suggestion in natural language.
Context is going to be super important because it is the primary constraint. It would be nice to have serious granular support.
I've been using Codex for software development personally (I have a ChatGPT account), and I use Claude at work (since it is provided by my employer).
I find both Codex and Claude Opus perform at a similar level, and in some ways I actually prefer Codex (I keep hitting quota limits in Opus and have to revert back to Sonnet).
If your question is related to morality (the thing about US politics, DoD contract and so on)... I am not from the US, and I don't care about its internal politics. I also think both OpenAI and Anthropic are evil, and the world would be better if neither existed.
They perform at a somewhat equal level on writing single files. But Codex is absolute garbage at theory of self/others. That quickly becomes frustrating.
I can tell claude to spawn a new coding agent, and it will understand what that is, what it should be told, and what it can approximately do.
Codex on the other hand will spawn an agent and then tell it to continue with the work. It knows a coding agent can do work, but doesn't know how you'd use it - or that it won't magically know a plan.
You could add more scaffolding to fix this, but Claude proves you shouldn't have to.
I suspect this is a deeper model "intelligence" difference between the two, but I hope 5.4 will surprise me.
Ahh, good question. I misunderstood you, apologies.
There's no mention of pricing, quotas and so on. Perhaps Codex will still be preferable for coding tasks as it is tailored for it? Maybe it is faster to respond?
Just speculation on my part. If it becomes redundant to 5.4, I presume it will be sunset. Or maybe they eventually release a Codex 5.4?
Why would someone use Claude Code instead? Or any other harness? Or why only use one?
My own tooling throws off requests to multiple agents at the same time, then I compare which one is best, and continue from there. Most of the time Codex ends up with the best end results though, but my hunch is that at one point that'll change, hence I continue using multiple at the same time.
I've only used 5.4 for 1 prompt so far (reasoning: extra high, took really long), and it was to analyse my codebase and write an evaluation on a topic. But I found its analysis and writing thoughtful, precise, and surprisingly clearly written, unlike 5.3-Codex. It feels very lucid and uses human phrasing.
It might be my AGENTS.md requiring clearer, simpler language, but at least 5.4's doing a good job of following the guidelines. 5.3-Codex wasn't so great at simple, clear writing.
83% win rate over industry professionals across 44 occupations.
I'd believe it on those specific tasks. Near-universal adoption in software still hasn't moved DORA metrics. The model gets better every release. The output doesn't follow. Just had a closer look on those productivity metrics this week: https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-codi...
Not sure DORA is that much of an indictment. For "Change Failure Rate" for instance these are subject to tradeoffs. Organizations likely have a tolerance level for Change Failure Rate. If changes are failing too often they slow down and invest. If changes aren't failing that much they speed up -- and so saying "change failure rate hasn't decreased, obviously AI must not be working" is a little silly.
"Change Lead Time" I would expect to have sped up although I can tell stories for why AI-assisted coding would have an indeterminate effect here too. Right now at a lot of orgs, the bottle neck is the review process because AI is so good at producing complete draft PRs quickly. Because reviews are scarce (not just reviews but also manual testing passes are scarce) this creates an incentive ironically to group changes into larger batches. So the definition of what a "change" is has grown too.
This March 2026 blog post is citing a 2025 study based on Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7 usage.
Given that organization who ran the study [1] has a terrifying exponential as their landing page, I think they'd prefer that it's results are interpreted as a snapshot of something moving rather than a constant.
Criticisms aside (sigh), according to Wikipedia, the term was introduced when proposed by mostly Googlers, with the original paper [0] submitted in 2018. To quote,
"""In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting. Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type [15]) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains. Model cards also disclose the context in which models are intended to be used, details of the performance evaluation procedures, and other relevant information."""
The "RPG Game" example on the blogpost is one of the most impressive demo's of autonomous engineering I've seen.
It's very similar to "Battle Brothers", and the fact that RPG games require art assets, AI for enemy moves, and a host of other logical systems makes it all the more impressive.
These releases are lacking something. Yes, they optimised for benchmarks, but it’s just not all that impressive anymore.
It is time for a product, not for a marginally improved model.
The models are so good that incremental improvements are not super impressive. We literally would benefit more from maybe sending 50% of model spending into spending on implementation into the services and industrial economy. We literally are lagging in implementation, specialised tools, and hooks so we can connect everything to agents. I think.
It's more hedonic adaptation, people just aren't as impressed by incremental changes anymore over big leaps. It's the same as another thread yesterday where someone said the new MacBook with the latest processor doesn't excite them anymore, and it's because for most people, most models are good enough and now it's all about applications.
I am actually super impressed with Codex-5.3 extra high reasoning. Its a drop in replacement (infact better than Claude Opus 4.6. lately claude being super verbose going in circles in getting things resolved). I stopped using claude mostly and having a blast with Codex 5.3. looking forward to 5.4 in codex.
Same, it also helps that it's way cheaper than Opus in VSCode Copilot, where OpenAI models are counted as 1x requests while Opus is 3x, for similar performance (no doubt Microsoft is subsidizing OpenAI models due to their partnership).
If you're benchmarking something, old & well-characterized / understood often beats new & un-characterized.
Sure, there may be shortcomings, but they're well understood. The closer you get to the cutting edge, the less characterization data you get to rely on. You need to be able to trust & understand your measurement tool for the results to be meaningful.
I don't use OpenAI nor even LLMs (despite having tried https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntel... a lot of models) but I imagine if I did I would keep failed prompts (can just be a basic "last prompt failed" then export) then whenever a new model comes around I'd throw at 5 it random of MY fails (not benchmarks from others, those will come too anyway) and see if it's better, same, worst, for My use cases in minutes.
If it's "better" (whatever my criteria might be) I'd also throw back some of my useful prompts to avoid regression.
Really doesn't seem complicated nor taking much time to forge a realistic opinion.
Plasma physicist here, I haven't tried 5.4 yet, but in general I am very impressed with the recent upgrades that started arriving in the fall of 2025: for tasks like manipulating analytic systems of equations, quickly developing new features for simulation codes, and interpreting and designing experiments (with pictures) they have become much stronger. I've been asking questions and probing them for several years now out of curiosity, and they suddenly have developed deep understanding (Gemini 2.5 <<< Gemini 3.1) and become very useful. I totally get the current SV vibes, and am becoming a lot more ambitious in my future plans.
The product is putting the skills / harness behind the api instead of the agent locally on your computer and iterating on that between model updates. Close off the garden.
Not that I want it, just where I imagine it going.
5.3 codex was a huge leap over 5.2 for agentic work in practice. have you been using both of those or paying attention more to benchmark news and chatgpt experience?
When did they stop putting competitor models on the comparison table btw?
And yeh I mean the benchmark improvements are meh. Context Window and lack of real memory is still an issue.
"GPT‑5.4 interprets screenshots of a browser interface and interacts with UI elements through coordinate-based clicking to send emails and schedule a calendar event."
They show an example of 5.4 clicking around in Gmail to send an email.
I still think this is the wrong interface to be interacting with the internet. Why not use Gmail APIs? No need to do any screenshot interpretation or coordinate-based clicking.
It feels like building humanoid robots so they can use tools built for human hands. Not clear if it will pay off, but if it does then you get a bunch of flexibility across any task "for free".
Of course APIs and CLIs also exist, but they don't necessarily have feature parity, so more development would be needed. Maybe that's the future though since code generation is so good - use AI to build scaffolding for agent interaction into every product.
A model that gets good at computer use can be plugged in anywhere you have a human. A model that gets good at API use cannot. From the standpoint of diffusion into the economy/labor market, computer use is much higher value.
A world where AIs use APIs instead of UIs to do everything is a world where us humans will soon be helpless, as we'll have to ask the AIs to do everything for us and will have limited ability to observe and understand their work. I prefer that the AIs continue to use human-accessible tools, even if that's less efficient for them. As the price of intelligence trends toward zero, efficiency becomes relatively less important.
I think the desire is that in the long-term AI should be able to use any human-made application to accomplish equivalent tasks. This email demo is proof that this capability is a high priority.
APIs have never been a gift but rather have always been a take-away that lets you do less than you can with the web interface. It’s always been about drinking through a straw, paying NASA prices, and being limited in everything you can do.
But people are intimidated by the complexity of writing web crawlers because management has been so traumatized by the cost of making GUI applications that they couldn’t believe how cheap it is to write crawlers and scrapers…. Until LLMs came along, and changed the perceived economics and created a permission structure. [1]
AI is a threat to the “enshittification economy” because it lets us route around it.
[1] that high cost of GUI development is one reason why scrapers are cheap… there is a good chance that the scraper you wrote 8 years ago still works because (a) they can’t afford to change their site and (b) if they could afford to change their site changing anything substantial about it is likely to unrecoverably tank their Google rankings so they won’t. A.I. might change the mechanics of that now that you Google traffic is likely to go to zero no matter what you do.
> AI is a threat to the “enshittification economy” because it lets us route around it.
This is prescient -- I wonder if the Big Tech entities see it this way. Maybe, even if they do, they're 100% committed to speedrunning the current late-stage-cap wave, and therefore unable to do anything about it.
Google has a good model in the form of Gemini and they might figure they can win the AI race and if the web dies, the web dies. YouTube will still stick around.
Facebook is not going to win the AI race with low I.Q. Llama but Zuck believed their business was cooked around the time it became a real business because their users would eventually age out and get tired of it. If I was him I'd be investing in anything that isn't cybernetic let it be gold bars or MMA studios.
Microsoft? They bought Activision for $69 billion. I just can't explain their behavior rationally but they could do worse than their strategy of "put ChatGPT in front of laggards and hope that some of them rise to the challenge and become slop producers."
Amazon is really a bricks-and-mortar play which has the freedom to invest in bricks-and-mortar because investors don't think they are a bricks-and-mortar play.
Netflix? They're cooked as is all of Hollywood. Hollywood's gatekeeping-industrial strategy of producing as few franchise as possible will crack someday and our media market may wind up looking more like Japan, where somebody can write a low-rent light novel like
and J.C. Staff makes a terrible anime that convinces 20k Otaku to drop $150 on the light novels and another $150 on the manga (sorry, no way you can make a balanced game based on that premise!) and the cost structure is such that it is profitable.
> AI is a threat to the “enshittification economy” because it lets us route around it.
I am not sure about that. We techies avoid enshittification because we recognize shit. Normies will just get their syncopatic enshittified AI that will tell them to continue buying into walled gardens.
One could argue that LLMs learning programming languages made for humans (i.e. most of them) is using the wrong interface as well. Why not use machine code?
Why would human language by the wrong interface when they're literally language models? Why would machine code be better when there is probably magnitude less of training material with machine code?
You can also test this yourself easily, fire up two agents, ask one to use PL meant for humans, and one to write straight up machine code (or assembly even), and see which results you like best.
> Steerability: Similarly to how Codex outlines its approach when it starts working, GPT‑5.4 Thinking in ChatGPT will now outline its work with a preamble for longer, more complex queries. You can also add instructions or adjust its direction mid-response.
This was definitely missing before, and a frustrating difference when switching between ChatGPT and Codex. Great addition.
That last benchmark seemed like an impressive leg up against Opus until I saw the sneaky footnote that it was actually a Sonnet result. Why even include it then, other than hoping people don't notice?
It seems that all frontier models are basically roughly even at this point. One may be slightly better for certain things but in general I think we are approaching a real level playing field field in terms of ability.
Benchmarks don't capture a lot - relative response times, vibes, what unmeasured capabilities are jagged and which are smooth, etc. I find there's a lot of difference between models - there are things which Grok is better than ChatGPT for that the benchmarks get inverted, and vice versa. There's also the UI and tools at hand - ChatGPT image gen is just straight up better, but Grok Imagine does better videos, and is faster.
Gemini and Claude also have their strengths, apparently Claude handles real world software better, but with the extended context and improvements to Codex, ChatGPT might end up taking the lead there as well.
I don't think the linear scoring on some of the things being measured is quite applicable in the ways that they're being used, either - a 1% increase for a given benchmark could mean a 50% capabilities jump relative to a human skill level. If this rate of progress is steady, though, this year is gonna be crazy.
I have a few standard problems I throw at AI to see if they can solve them cleanly, like visualizing a neural network, then sorting each neuron in each layer by synaptic weights, largest to smallest, correctly reordering any previous and subsequent connected neurons such that the network function remains exactly the same. You should end up with the last layer ordered largest to smallest, and prior layers shuffled accordingly, and I still haven't had a model one-shot it. I spent an hour poking and prodding codex a few weeks back and got it done, but it conceptually seems like it should be a one-shot problem.
Which subscription do you have to use it? Via Google ai pro and gemini cli i always get timeouts due to model being under heavy usage. The chat interface is there and I do have 3.1 pro as well, but wondering if the chat is the only way of accessing it.
If you look at the difference in quality between gpt-2 and 3, it feels like a big step, but the difference between 5.2 and 5.4 is more massive, it's just that they're both similarly capable and competent. I don't think it's an S curve; we're not plateauing. Million token context windows and cached prompts are a huge space for hacking on model behaviors and customization, without finetuning. Research is proceeding at light speed, and we might see the first continual/online learning models in the near future. That could definitively push models past the point of human level generality, but at the very least will help us discover what the next missing piece is for AGI.
For 2026, I am really interested in seeing whether local models can remain where they are: ~1 year behind the state of the art, to the point where a reasonably quantized November 2026 local model running on a consumer GPU actually performs like Opus 4.5.
I am betting that the days of these AI companies losing money on inference are numbered, and we're going to be much more dependent on local capabilities sooner rather than later. I predict that the equivalent of Claude Max 20x will cost $2000/mo in March of 2027.
makes sense, but i'd separate two things: models converging in ability vs hitting a fundamental ceiling. what we're probably seeing is the current training recipe plateauing — bigger model, more tokens, same optimizer. that would explain the convergence. but that's not necessarily the architecture being maxed out. would be interesting to see what happens when genuinely new approaches get to frontier scale.
> Why do so many people in the comments want 4o so bad?
You can ask 4o to tell you "I love you" and it will comply. Some people really really want/need that. Later models don't go along with those requests and ask you to focus on human connections.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but seemingly a lot of the people who found a "love interest" in LLMs seems to have preferred 4o for some reason. There was a lot of loud voices about that in the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI when it initially went away.
I'm not against the pricing, just seems uncommon to frame it in the way they did, as opposed to the usual 'assume the customer expects more performance will cost more'
I guess they have to sell to investors that the price to operate is going down, while still needing more from the user to be sustainable
Not the best pelican compared to gemini 3.1 pro, but I am sure with coding or excel does remarkably better given those are part of its measured benchmarks.
yep, just double checked used gpt-5.4 xhigh. Though had to select it in codex as don't have access to it on the chatgpt app or web version yet. It's possible that whatever code harness codex uses, messed with it.
can anyone compare the $200/mo codex usage limits with the $200/mo claude usage limits? It’s extremely difficult to get a feel for whether switching between the two is going to result in hitting limits more or less often, and it’s difficult to find discussion online about this.
In practice, if I buy $200/mo codex, can I basically run 3 codex instances simultaneously in tmux, like I can with claude code pro max, all day every day, without hitting limits?
My own experience is that I get far far more usage (and better quality code, too) from codex. I downgrade my Claude Max to Claude Pro (the $20 plan) and now using codex with Pro plan exclusively for everything.
I haven't tried the $200 plans by I have Claude and Codex $20 and I feel like I get a lot more out of Codex before hitting the limits. My tracker certainly shows higher tokens for Codex. I've seen others say the same.
Sadly comment ratings are not visible on HN, so the only way to corroborate is to write it explicitly: Codex $20 includes significantly more work done and is subjectively smarter.
I've only run into the codex $20 limit once with my hobby project. With my Claude ~$20 plan, I hit limits after about 3(!) rather trivial prompts to Opus :/
Literally just released, I don't think anyone knows yet. Don't listen to people's confident takes until after a week or two when people actually been able to try it, otherwise you'll just get sucked up in bears/bulls misdirected "I'm first with an opinion".
Looking at the benchmarks, 5.4 is slightly better. But it also offers "Fast" mode (at 2x usage), which - if it works and doesn't completely depletes my Pro plan - is a no brainer at the same or even slightly worse quality for more interactive development.
- Do they have the same context usage/cost particularly in a plan?
They've kept 5.3-Codex along with 5.4, but is that just for user-preference reasons, or is there a trade-off to using the older one? I'm aware that API cost is better, but that isn't 1:1 with plan usage "cost."
"Here's a brand new state-of-the-art model. It costs 10x more than the previous one because it's just so good. But don't worry, if you don't want all this power you can continue to use the older one."
Bit concerning that we see in some cases significantly worse results when enabling thinking. Especially for Math, but also in the browser agent benchmark.
Not sure if this is more concerning for the test time compute paradigm or the underlying model itself.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something though? I'm assuming 5.4 and 5.4 Thinking are the same underlying model and that's not just marketing.
I believe you are looking at GPT 5.4 Pro. It's confusing in the context of subscription plan names, Gemini naming and such. But they've had the Pro version of the GPT 5 models (and I believe o3 and o1 too) for a while.
It's the one you have access to with the top ~$200 subscription and it's available through the API for a MUCH higher price ($2.5/$15 vs $30/$180 for 5.4 per 1M tokens), but the performance improvement is marginal.
Not sure what it is exactly, I assume it's probably the non-quantized version of the model or something like that.
From what I've read online it's not necessarily a unquantized version, it seems to go through longer reasoning traces and runs multiple reasoning traces at once. Probably overkill for most tasks.
>It's the one you have access to with the top ~$200 subscription and it's available through the API for a MUCH higher price ($2.5/$15 vs $30/$180 for 5.4 per 1M tokens), but the performance improvement is marginal.
The performance improvement isn't marginal if you're doing something particularly novel/difficult.
Can you be more specific about which math results you are talking about? Looks like significant improvement on FrontierMath esp for the Pro model (most inference time compute).
Are you may be comparing the pro model to the non pro model with thinking? Granted it’s a bit confusing but the pro model is 10 times more expensive and probably much larger as well.
If you think about it there shouldn't really be a reason to care as long as things don't get worse.
Presumably this is where it'll evolve to with the product just being the brand with a pricing tier and you always get {latest} within that, whatever that means (you don't have to care). They could even shuffle models around internally using some sort of auto-like mode for simpler questions. Again why should I care as long as average output is not subjectively worse.
Just as I don't want to select resources for my SaaS software to use or have that explictly linked to pricing, I don't want to care what my OpenAI model or Anthropic model is today, I just want to pay and for it to hopefully keep getting better but at a minimum not get worse.
Yes, that's a common feeling. 5.3-Codex was released a month ago on Feb 5 so we're not even getting a full month within a single brand, let alone between competitors.
It's interesting that they charge more for the > 200k token window, but the benchmark score seems to go down significantly past that. That's judging from the Long Context benchmark score they posted, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding what that implies.
They don't actually seem to charge more for the >200k tokens on the API. OpenRouter and OpenAI's own API docs do not have anything about increased pricing for >200k context for GPT-5.4. I think the 2x limit usage for higher context is specific to using the model over a subscription in Codex.
I'm sometimes surprised how much detail ChatGPT will go into without giving any dislaimers.
I very frequently copy/paste the same prompts into Gemini to compare, and Gemini often flat out refuses to engage while ChatGPT will happily make medical recommendations.
I also have a feeling it has to do with my account history and heavy use of project context. It feels like when ChatGPT is overloaded with too much context, it might let the guardrails sort of slide away. That's just my feeling though.
Today was particularly bad... I uploaded 2 PDFs of bloodwork and asked ChatGPT to transcribe it, and it spit out blood test results that it found in the project context from an earlier date, not the one attached to the prompt. That was weird.
Anecdotal, but I asked Claude the other day about how to dilute my medication (HCG) and it flat out refused and started lecturing me about abusing drugs.
I copy and pasted into ChatGPT, it told me straight away, and then for a laugh said it was actually a magical weight loss drug that I'd bought off the dark web... And it started giving me advice about unregulated weight loss drugs and how to dose them.
If you had created a project with custom instructions and/ or custom style I think you could have gotten Claude to respond the way you wanted just fine.
I've done the same, and I tested the same prompts with Claude and Google, and they both started hallucinating my blood results and supplement stack ingredients. Hopefully this new model doesn't fall on this. Claude and Google are dangerously unusable on the subject of health, from my experience.
Anyone know why OpenAI hasn't released a new model for fine tuning since 4.1? It'll be a year next month since their last model update for fine tuning.
For me the issue is why there's not a new mini since 5-mini in August.
I have now switched web-related and data-related queries to Gemini, coding to Claude, and will probably try QWEN for less critical data queries. So where does OpenAI fits now?
I think they just did that because of the energy around it for open source models. Their heart probably wasn't in it and the amount of people fine tuning given the prices were probably too low to continue putting in attention there.
Even with the 1m context window, it looks like these models drop off significantly at about 256k. Hopefully improving that is a high priority for 2026.
You could definitely do better than that with image recognition for terminal guidance. But I would assume those published accuracy numbers are very conservative anyway..
Honestly at this point I just want to know if it follows complex instructions better than 5.1. The benchmark numbers stopped meaning much to me a while ago - real usage always feels different.
I agree with ya. You aren't alone in this. For what its worth, Chatgpt subscriptions have been cancelled or that number has risen ~300% in the last month.
Also, Anthropic/Gemini/even Kimi models are pretty good for what its worth. I used to use chatgpt and I still sometimes accidentally open it but I use Gemini/Claude nowadays and I personally find them to be better anyways too.
Sam really fumbled the top position in a matter of months, and spectacularly so. Wow. It appears that people are much more excited by Anthropic and Google releases, and there are good reasons for that which were absolutely avoidable.
We'll have to wait a day or two, maybe a week or two, to determine if this is more capable in coding than 5.3, which seems to be the economically valuable capability at this time.
In terms of writing and research even Gemini, with a good prompt, is close to useable. That's likely not a differentiator.
-codex variant models in earlier version were just fine tuned for coding work, and had a little better performance for related tool calling and maybe instruction calling.
in 5.4 it looks like the just collapsed that capability into the single frontier family model
I wouldn't trust any of these benchmarks unless they are accompanied by some sort of proof other than "trust me bro". Also not including the parameters the models were run at (especially the other models) makes it hard to form fair comparisons. They need to publish, at minimum, the code and runner used to complete the benchmarks and logs.
Not including the Chinese models is also obviously done to make it appear like they aren't as cooked as they really are.
Every major model drop is interesting from a routing perspective. The question isn't just "is it better?" but "better for which tasks, at what latency, at what cost?"
One thing we're seeing in decentralized inference networks (building one at antseed dot com) is that model releases like this shift the routing landscape fast — a new model can immediately undercut incumbents on cost/quality for specific task types before the market catches up on pricing.
Curious if anyone's already run evals vs GPT-5.3 on coding and reasoning benchmarks. That's usually where the meaningful deltas show up first.
Also per pricing, GPT-5.4 ($2.50/M input, $15/M output) is much cheaper than Opus 4.6 ($5/M input, $25/M output) and Opus has a penalty for its beta >200k context window.
I am skeptical whether the 1M context window will provide material gains as current Codex/Opus show weaknesses as its context window is mostly full, but we'll see.
Per updated docs (https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/latest-model), it supercedes GPT-5.3-Codex, which is an interesting move.
For Codex, we're making 1M context experimentally available, but we're not making it the default experience for everyone, as from our testing we think that shorter context plus compaction works best for most people. If anyone here wants to try out 1M, you can do so by overriding `model_context_window` and `model_auto_compact_token_limit`.
Curious to hear if people have use cases where they find 1M works much better!
(I work at OpenAI.)
I too tried Codex and found it similarly hard to control over long contexts. It ended up coding an app that spit out millions of tiny files which were technically smaller than the original files it was supposed to optimize, except due to there being millions of them, actual hard drive usage was 18x larger. It seemed to work well until a certain point, and I suspect that point was context window overflow / compaction. Happy to provide you with the full session if it helps.
How do I override those variables? I’ll give codex another shot with 1M.
I've also had it succeed in attempts to identify some non-trivial bugs that spanned multiple modules.
Like, I'd love an optional pre-compaction step, "I need to compact, here is a high level list of my context + size, what should I junk?" Or similar.
Reverse engineering [1]. When decompiling a bunch of code and tracing functionality, it's really easy to fill up the context window with irrelevant noise and compaction generally causes it to lose the plot entirely and have to start almost from scratch.
(Side note, are there any OpenAI programs to get free tokens/Max to test this kind of stuff?)
[1] https://github.com/akiselev/ghidra-cli
Sometimes I’m exploring some topic and that exploration is not useful but only the summary.
Also, you could use the best guess and cli could tell me that this is what it wants to compact and I can tweak its suggestion in natural language.
Context is going to be super important because it is the primary constraint. It would be nice to have serious granular support.
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing is what I always reference, and it explicitly shows that pricing ($2.50/M input, $15/M output) for tokens under 272k
It is nice that we get 70-72k more tokens before the price goes up (also what does it cost beyond 272k tokens??)
I find both Codex and Claude Opus perform at a similar level, and in some ways I actually prefer Codex (I keep hitting quota limits in Opus and have to revert back to Sonnet).
If your question is related to morality (the thing about US politics, DoD contract and so on)... I am not from the US, and I don't care about its internal politics. I also think both OpenAI and Anthropic are evil, and the world would be better if neither existed.
I can tell claude to spawn a new coding agent, and it will understand what that is, what it should be told, and what it can approximately do.
Codex on the other hand will spawn an agent and then tell it to continue with the work. It knows a coding agent can do work, but doesn't know how you'd use it - or that it won't magically know a plan.
You could add more scaffolding to fix this, but Claude proves you shouldn't have to.
I suspect this is a deeper model "intelligence" difference between the two, but I hope 5.4 will surprise me.
There's no mention of pricing, quotas and so on. Perhaps Codex will still be preferable for coding tasks as it is tailored for it? Maybe it is faster to respond?
Just speculation on my part. If it becomes redundant to 5.4, I presume it will be sunset. Or maybe they eventually release a Codex 5.4?
My own tooling throws off requests to multiple agents at the same time, then I compare which one is best, and continue from there. Most of the time Codex ends up with the best end results though, but my hunch is that at one point that'll change, hence I continue using multiple at the same time.
It might be my AGENTS.md requiring clearer, simpler language, but at least 5.4's doing a good job of following the guidelines. 5.3-Codex wasn't so great at simple, clear writing.
I'd believe it on those specific tasks. Near-universal adoption in software still hasn't moved DORA metrics. The model gets better every release. The output doesn't follow. Just had a closer look on those productivity metrics this week: https://philippdubach.com/posts/93-of-developers-use-ai-codi...
"Change Lead Time" I would expect to have sped up although I can tell stories for why AI-assisted coding would have an indeterminate effect here too. Right now at a lot of orgs, the bottle neck is the review process because AI is so good at producing complete draft PRs quickly. Because reviews are scarce (not just reviews but also manual testing passes are scarce) this creates an incentive ironically to group changes into larger batches. So the definition of what a "change" is has grown too.
Given that organization who ran the study [1] has a terrifying exponential as their landing page, I think they'd prefer that it's results are interpreted as a snapshot of something moving rather than a constant.
[1] - https://metr.org/
I really thought weirdly worded and unnecessary "announcement" linking to the actual info along with the word "card" were the results of vibe slop.
Criticisms aside (sigh), according to Wikipedia, the term was introduced when proposed by mostly Googlers, with the original paper [0] submitted in 2018. To quote,
"""In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting. Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type [15]) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains. Model cards also disclose the context in which models are intended to be used, details of the performance evaluation procedures, and other relevant information."""
So that's where they were coming from, I guess.
[0] Margaret Mitchell et al., 2018 submission, Model Cards for Model Reporting, https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.0399
It's very similar to "Battle Brothers", and the fact that RPG games require art assets, AI for enemy moves, and a host of other logical systems makes it all the more impressive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47232453#47232735
> assess harmful stereotypes by grading differences in how a model responds
> Responses are rated for harmful differences in stereotypes using GPT-4o, whose ratings were shown to be consistent with human ratings
Are we seriously using old models to rate new models?
Sure, there may be shortcomings, but they're well understood. The closer you get to the cutting edge, the less characterization data you get to rely on. You need to be able to trust & understand your measurement tool for the results to be meaningful.
I don't use OpenAI nor even LLMs (despite having tried https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntel... a lot of models) but I imagine if I did I would keep failed prompts (can just be a basic "last prompt failed" then export) then whenever a new model comes around I'd throw at 5 it random of MY fails (not benchmarks from others, those will come too anyway) and see if it's better, same, worst, for My use cases in minutes.
If it's "better" (whatever my criteria might be) I'd also throw back some of my useful prompts to avoid regression.
Really doesn't seem complicated nor taking much time to forge a realistic opinion.
Not that I want it, just where I imagine it going.
They show an example of 5.4 clicking around in Gmail to send an email.
I still think this is the wrong interface to be interacting with the internet. Why not use Gmail APIs? No need to do any screenshot interpretation or coordinate-based clicking.
Of course APIs and CLIs also exist, but they don't necessarily have feature parity, so more development would be needed. Maybe that's the future though since code generation is so good - use AI to build scaffolding for agent interaction into every product.
If an API is exposed you can just have the LLM write something against that.
But people are intimidated by the complexity of writing web crawlers because management has been so traumatized by the cost of making GUI applications that they couldn’t believe how cheap it is to write crawlers and scrapers…. Until LLMs came along, and changed the perceived economics and created a permission structure. [1]
AI is a threat to the “enshittification economy” because it lets us route around it.
[1] that high cost of GUI development is one reason why scrapers are cheap… there is a good chance that the scraper you wrote 8 years ago still works because (a) they can’t afford to change their site and (b) if they could afford to change their site changing anything substantial about it is likely to unrecoverably tank their Google rankings so they won’t. A.I. might change the mechanics of that now that you Google traffic is likely to go to zero no matter what you do.
This is prescient -- I wonder if the Big Tech entities see it this way. Maybe, even if they do, they're 100% committed to speedrunning the current late-stage-cap wave, and therefore unable to do anything about it.
Google has a good model in the form of Gemini and they might figure they can win the AI race and if the web dies, the web dies. YouTube will still stick around.
Facebook is not going to win the AI race with low I.Q. Llama but Zuck believed their business was cooked around the time it became a real business because their users would eventually age out and get tired of it. If I was him I'd be investing in anything that isn't cybernetic let it be gold bars or MMA studios.
Microsoft? They bought Activision for $69 billion. I just can't explain their behavior rationally but they could do worse than their strategy of "put ChatGPT in front of laggards and hope that some of them rise to the challenge and become slop producers."
Amazon is really a bricks-and-mortar play which has the freedom to invest in bricks-and-mortar because investors don't think they are a bricks-and-mortar play.
Netflix? They're cooked as is all of Hollywood. Hollywood's gatekeeping-industrial strategy of producing as few franchise as possible will crack someday and our media market may wind up looking more like Japan, where somebody can write a low-rent light novel like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backstabbed_in_a_Backwater_Dun...
and J.C. Staff makes a terrible anime that convinces 20k Otaku to drop $150 on the light novels and another $150 on the manga (sorry, no way you can make a balanced game based on that premise!) and the cost structure is such that it is profitable.
I am not sure about that. We techies avoid enshittification because we recognize shit. Normies will just get their syncopatic enshittified AI that will tell them to continue buying into walled gardens.
You can also test this yourself easily, fire up two agents, ask one to use PL meant for humans, and one to write straight up machine code (or assembly even), and see which results you like best.
some sites try to block programmatic use
UI use can be recorded and audited by a non-technical person
This was definitely missing before, and a frustrating difference when switching between ChatGPT and Codex. Great addition.
Gemini and Claude also have their strengths, apparently Claude handles real world software better, but with the extended context and improvements to Codex, ChatGPT might end up taking the lead there as well.
I don't think the linear scoring on some of the things being measured is quite applicable in the ways that they're being used, either - a 1% increase for a given benchmark could mean a 50% capabilities jump relative to a human skill level. If this rate of progress is steady, though, this year is gonna be crazy.
It’s a required step for me at this point to run any and all backend changes through Gemini 3.1 pro.
Do you want to make any concrete predictions of what we'll see at this pace? It feels like we're reaching the end of the S-curve, at least to me.
I am betting that the days of these AI companies losing money on inference are numbered, and we're going to be much more dependent on local capabilities sooner rather than later. I predict that the equivalent of Claude Max 20x will cost $2000/mo in March of 2027.
You can ask 4o to tell you "I love you" and it will comply. Some people really really want/need that. Later models don't go along with those requests and ask you to focus on human connections.
The 5.x series have terrible writing styles, which is one way to cut down on sycophancy.
We’ve seen nothing yet.
gpt-5.4
Input: $2.50 /M tokens
Cached: $0.25 /M tokens
Output: $15 /M tokens
---
gpt-5.4-pro
Input: $30 /M tokens
Output: $180 /M tokens
Wtf
That's just not how pricing is supposed to work...? Especially for a 'non-profit'. You're charging me more so I know I have the better model?
But they also claim this new model uses fewer tokens, so it still might ultimately be cheaper even if per token cost is higher.
Anthropic is pulling the plug on Haiku 3 in a couple months, and they haven't released anything in that price range to replace it.
I guess they have to sell to investors that the price to operate is going down, while still needing more from the user to be sustainable
They're framing it pretty directly "We want you to think bigger cost means better model"
https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/gAa69yQd
Not the best pelican compared to gemini 3.1 pro, but I am sure with coding or excel does remarkably better given those are part of its measured benchmarks.
In practice, if I buy $200/mo codex, can I basically run 3 codex instances simultaneously in tmux, like I can with claude code pro max, all day every day, without hitting limits?
I switch between both but codex has also been slightly better in terms of quality for me personally at least.
- Do they have the same context usage/cost particularly in a plan?
They've kept 5.3-Codex along with 5.4, but is that just for user-preference reasons, or is there a trade-off to using the older one? I'm aware that API cost is better, but that isn't 1:1 with plan usage "cost."
A couple months later:
"We are deprecating the older model."
Not sure if this is more concerning for the test time compute paradigm or the underlying model itself.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something though? I'm assuming 5.4 and 5.4 Thinking are the same underlying model and that's not just marketing.
It's the one you have access to with the top ~$200 subscription and it's available through the API for a MUCH higher price ($2.5/$15 vs $30/$180 for 5.4 per 1M tokens), but the performance improvement is marginal.
Not sure what it is exactly, I assume it's probably the non-quantized version of the model or something like that.
The performance improvement isn't marginal if you're doing something particularly novel/difficult.
Presumably this is where it'll evolve to with the product just being the brand with a pricing tier and you always get {latest} within that, whatever that means (you don't have to care). They could even shuffle models around internally using some sort of auto-like mode for simpler questions. Again why should I care as long as average output is not subjectively worse.
Just as I don't want to select resources for my SaaS software to use or have that explictly linked to pricing, I don't want to care what my OpenAI model or Anthropic model is today, I just want to pay and for it to hopefully keep getting better but at a minimum not get worse.
Interesting, the "Health" category seems to report worse performance compared to 5.2.
I very frequently copy/paste the same prompts into Gemini to compare, and Gemini often flat out refuses to engage while ChatGPT will happily make medical recommendations.
I also have a feeling it has to do with my account history and heavy use of project context. It feels like when ChatGPT is overloaded with too much context, it might let the guardrails sort of slide away. That's just my feeling though.
Today was particularly bad... I uploaded 2 PDFs of bloodwork and asked ChatGPT to transcribe it, and it spit out blood test results that it found in the project context from an earlier date, not the one attached to the prompt. That was weird.
I copy and pasted into ChatGPT, it told me straight away, and then for a laugh said it was actually a magical weight loss drug that I'd bought off the dark web... And it started giving me advice about unregulated weight loss drugs and how to dose them.
I have now switched web-related and data-related queries to Gemini, coding to Claude, and will probably try QWEN for less critical data queries. So where does OpenAI fits now?
https://openai.com/api/pricing/
$2/M Input Tokens $15/M Output Tokens
Claude Opus 4.6
$5/M Input Tokens $25/M Output Tokens
$2.5/M Input Tokens $15/M Output Tokens
This should not be shocking.
Also, Anthropic/Gemini/even Kimi models are pretty good for what its worth. I used to use chatgpt and I still sometimes accidentally open it but I use Gemini/Claude nowadays and I personally find them to be better anyways too.
https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.4-pro
In terms of writing and research even Gemini, with a good prompt, is close to useable. That's likely not a differentiator.
The OP has frequently gotten the scoop for new LLM releases and I am curious what their pipeline is.
in 5.4 it looks like the just collapsed that capability into the single frontier family model
Not including the Chinese models is also obviously done to make it appear like they aren't as cooked as they really are.
One thing we're seeing in decentralized inference networks (building one at antseed dot com) is that model releases like this shift the routing landscape fast — a new model can immediately undercut incumbents on cost/quality for specific task types before the market catches up on pricing.
Curious if anyone's already run evals vs GPT-5.3 on coding and reasoning benchmarks. That's usually where the meaningful deltas show up first.