I agree. I mean, I can get o3 right from the API if I choose, but 5-Thinking is better than o3, and 5-Research is definitely better than o3 pro in both ergonomics and output quality. If you read reddit about 4o, the group that formed a parasocial relationship with 4o and relied on its sycophancy seems to be the main group complaining. Interesting from a product market fit perspective, but not worrying as to "Is 5 on the whole significantly better than 4 / o1 / o3?" It is. Well, 5-mini is a dumpster fire, and awful. But I do not use it. I'm sure it's super cheap to run.

Another way to think of oAI the business situation is: are customers using more inference minutes than a year ago? I definitely am. Most definitely. For multiple reasons: agent round trip interactions, multimodal parsing, parallel codex runs..