OpenAI overrode concerns of expert testers to release sycophantic GPT-4o

It’s been a bit of a topsy-turvy week for the number one generative AI company in terms of users.

OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, released and then withdrew an updated version of the underlying multimodal (text, image, audio) large language model (LLM) that ChatGPT is hooked up to by default, GPT-4o, due to it being too sycophantic to users. The company recently reported at least 500 million active weekly users of the hit web service.

A quick primer on the terrible, no good, sycophantic GPT-4o update

OpenAI began updating GPT-4o to a newer model it hoped would be more well-received by users on April 24th, completed the updated by April 25th, then, five days later, rolled it back on April 29, after days of mounting complaints of users across social media — mainly on X and Reddit.

The complaints varied in intensity and in specifics, but ...