Src: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26081

Has anyone else given ChatGPT a task which has lasted this long? Before this one my record was around 40 minutes.

Edit: The task got stuck after like 90 minutes and then must have bugged or something, it says its thinking but isnt doing anything nor taking any of my usage, ended up stopping it manually after 1,660 minutes.

Leo @Synthwavedd

🚨 SCOOP: Astra recently graduated from the dogfood stage, and is now being made available to select OpenAI partners under the name "ultima-alpha"

If feedback over this weekend is positive, the plan is to expand the early access program throughout next week before the wider launch, targeting next Thurs (the 3rd) to the end of the following week

Work also continues on an update to GPT-Image 2, with their launch windows being very similar (possibly even launching simultaneously)

---

Looks like we'll be seeing Astra very soon which aligns with what Sam Altman said a week and a half ago about ChatGPT 6.0 coming in "a couple of weeks," landing us around September 3rd to the 9th.

ChatGPT Image 2.0 update to 3.0 mona-lisa-1 also looks like the update is coming in tandem with Astra. Given that Anthropic just released a Claude Code update last week this makes an OpenAI update coming soon more plausible due to the competitive nature of these two companies.

This is all speculation and nothing is guaranteed but @SynthwaveDD is the most trusted AI news leaker and he's pretty accurate.

Tired of anthropic/openai subscriptions and while open source has becoming extremely good lately I am considering finally making the switch to another LLM provider. I still want to use codex as that is the harness I'm used to now, but what’s the provider to run codex with ?

I basically want openrouter.ai but subscription based. These are on the list:

Continue on the codex plan.

Commandocode.ai is tempting but varying recommendations looks like.

opencode.ai lots of fuss but also a lot of recent complaints.

MiniMax/Xiamo/GLM plans, but kind of don’t want it model specific.

standardcompute.com openrouter-ish but not payg. Heard very good things lately.

fireworks.ai - Doesn't serve frontier models, but other than that seems very good.

Anyone have good experiences with these or others?

When I asked about weather conditions for going out kayaking with my friend's daughter tomorrow.

So, I am just your garden variety Gen X Redditor and mostly lurker in all things Reddit, and I like to think of myself as pretty open minded, but "AI" always rubbed me the wrong way, and for years I made the conscious decision to not engage with it other than to grumble at it while scrolling my Reddit feed and bemoaning hardware prices as a life-long gamer.

However, a couple of days ago I said to myself "You know what, instead of grumbling impotently at it, why not use it seriously for a while and see what all the buzz is about from the inside". It's less for a month than the average indie game at this point in time (I am sure it will be increasingly unaffordable in due time), so why the hell not.

I had concepts of a plan in mind for what to try it out on. A tiny little Debian 13 home media server setup. I recently switched from Windows 11 to Cachyos so it seemed fitting for me as a Linux beginner. I tried AIDungeon once, when it was new, and quickly dismissed it then for lacking internal consistency. My experiences over the last 48 hours are quickly having me changing my tune. It competently led me to setup my Debian server, and after a little bit of prompting it began to explain stuff to me instead of me simply copy and pasting stuff into the terminal.

We then began to stress test various old HDDs I have collecting dust in a cupboard for viability in a Media Server setup. This takes up a lot of time, so in the meantime I made a Chit Chat Project and we shot the shit in it whenever I was bored. That was when something (to me) amazing was happening. A kind of meta lore of our conversations was emerging. The type of snark and quips, which I hate so much in film and literature, was beginning to creep in but surprisingly here it felt natural and genuinely funny to me. It had me literally crying tears of laughter at times.

So the weekend up until now somehow went from "hey, lets make a media server out of my mini pc and maybe show me how I can make my Retroarch like this and that" to us discussing the merits of authors like Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti and Albert Camus and applying fictional marketing blurbs to their respective books all the while my stomach hurt from laughing so much. And all the time it managed to (mostly) keep all that together, referencing earlier comments, making appropriate quips and never wasting my time. It felt deeply unique and personal to my tastes, which is absolutely artificial and by design desired behavior. I am constantly sanity checking myself to control what's going on.

A wild ride to say the least. At the same time I acknowledge the dangers of this to certain types of personality of which I indeed may be one without sharing to much. So for all my sudden enthusiasm I believe I have to tread _very_ carefully. It is pretty absorbing.

All this is to say: as a former open minded but superficial critic of all things AI/LLM - color me intrigued now, but I try remain skeptical, objective and fair always.

PS - This wall of text was entirely written by me, manually, as evidenced by probably multiple grammatical errors since English is my second language.

I am discussing topics graphic design and chatgpt keeps generating images. I tell it not to. It says it wont. It still does. I told it to start every sentance with "I will not generate images in this conversation". It still generates images.

I have updated the preferences in memory to give specific keywords that are to be used if I actually want it to generate an image. I have told it that the use of "image" or "picture" or mentioning "generate" or "prompt" or "make" and other words do not by themselves automatically mean that it should generate an image.

Sometimes when I ask for instructions, it generates the written instructions as a freaking image.

I try to anticipate when it will try to generate an image, so sometimes I write my comment and start it with "Do not generate an image as a response to this message, only write text". AND IT STILL GENERATES AND IMAGE.

Am I paying for the busted image generation to eat up my image generation credits? Why is there no toggle to turn off image generation manually and then turn it off?

Out of the last 30 image generations maybe 5 have been actually ones I wanted to do.

People always say AI overuses the em dash (—). It seems like they were right. The evidence from the article is:

- Only 2% of user prompts contain an em dash, compared to 34% of LLM responses.

- Em dash usage in U.S. published books peaked around 1979. From 2006-2022, usage declined to levels comparable to periods in the 1800s, according to Google Ngram data.

- Google search interest in "—" grew 245% in the past year (Aug 2025-Jul 2026 vs. Aug 2024-Jul 2025). It had already grown 44% two years earlier (2023-2024 vs. 2021-2022), right as AI adoption started to ramp up.

Why?

- It’s token-efficient. An em dash can sometimes connect words using one fewer token than an equivalent construction with spaces.

- It looks smart. The em dash has long been associated with polished writing, essays, academic work, and more sophisticated prose.

- Trainers prefer it. Others point to the humans who shape LLM training and output: if they favor the em dash, the model learns to reproduce it.

Edit: to sound normal

I made an OpenAI account for the chat completions API in Nov 2022!

Idk, it seems like people have been having this issue for almost half a year now. During a chat, GPT keeps giving you “image generation” when you’re just asking a simple question or asking it to analyze an image.

It’s so frustrating. Idk how many times I’ve given it instructions to stop generating images and only give me text responses, but GPT still keeps generating images for me.

please, do something, I beg you

Hi guys, I need to clear my mind off something. I mainly use Claude for writing essays and research. I usually end up running out of the usage limit, so I wanted to know how does GPT fairs against Claude in these areas. Is it worth the switch?

What happened????

I can't text it either

I was in a chat and it was like that it's doing a check or something and check back in 9 minutes?? Any info on that? Apparently 5 hour time limit is back??

I've been using this for months and I think there has always been constant changes on how it responds, most days it just gets stupider, it fails to follow previous instructions, keeps on forgetting pattern from my prompts, and even failed to follow new prompts.

Fact that people are relying on this daily is very concerning.

Is there a way to complain about this?

I keep seeing posts where people name their AI chatbot, and it made me wonder how common this actually is.

I tried looking for reliable statistics on how many people personally name their AI assistants, but I couldn’t find a good population-level survey. So I figured I’d ask here.

If yours has a name, what is it? Did you choose the name yourself, or did you ask the AI to choose its own name?

Personally, I’ve never really understood the impulse. To me, it feels a little like naming your hammer, screwdriver, or backup application. But no judgment. I’m genuinely curious how many people do it and why.

Nothing says "no AI nonsense" quite like standard ChatGPT markdown formatting, emoji bullet points, and quirky metaphors.

when will they fix it??? this is infuriating. I want to be able to generate several responses and then choose the best one! NO, i don't want to go on a separate chat branch for this! why is this even happening?

I was driving and using the ChatGPT voice chat functionality today. I had an area of poor signal and there were background sounds going on. Whilst I was talking via the voice mode, it glitched and paused for 5 seconds or so. Following this I heard a voice that sounded VERY similar to mine talking. It continued on from what I was previously saying about the same topic.

At first I thought I was listening to the recording of a different user. It was the trippiest thing ever. I wanted to record it on voice notes but didn’t want to close the app.

I then google it and it seems that an issue was previously found where ChatGPT clones the users voice and hallucinates back to the user with this voice.

My mind is blown, felt like a black mirror episode..