Tell HN: OpenAI silently removed Study Mode from ChatGPT

Here's hoping that it will return soon, as I really liked it.

110 points | by smokel 2 hours ago

15 comments

  • derrida 30 minutes ago
    Has ChatGPT gotten worse over past few months or is it I just have seen other things higher quality, or they stopped caring about user or something?

    All of a sudden feels like it gives me boilerplate and boiler plate of PR and cheesy reasoning, and like no actual answers - worse even - highly confident wrong answers that it then seeks to justify or explain (like it doesn't seem humble enough to be like "Actually, got that wrong" or if challenged it just caves over, accepts too readilythe assumptions in what the user is asking, or just blindly accepts a premise of the question) it's almost useless, like before it used to seem like could get it to emulate the way a certain writer or discourse speaks, now it seems like this derpy highschool just wants to be in kid that went into public relations and the language no matter what the topic seems always the same, it's really spammy feeling,

    I could be asking it questions about like how medieval monks talked about light and the breath in latin and it will be replying like I'm interested in monetising or improving my lifestyle or some b.s. I don't think it used to be this way?

    reminds of a circa 2003-6 wordpress sites - blackhat seo - feeling to generate back links to push affiliate links or something, with markov generated content designed to push back links for the actual human written landing page

    It's not like this on the other llms, something's up.

    Or maybe they have just found the niche and it is a bunch of people who do think like that - like I dunno - middle management the world over

    oh god!

    is that it?

    Oh scary! I kinda hope it's not but I fear it might be. I hope rather that it is broken, quick to be patched ..

    That is scary... ghastly incantations of the epistemology of middle management from which arise "meetings".

    • suburban_strike 6 minutes ago
      It's gotten bad enough that I finally cancelled this month in protest. It's not just you.
    • omgJustTest 12 minutes ago
      people have been talking about "models of models" for arbitration opportunity in inference for about 1.5 yrs.

      Arbitration idea: if a user doesn't need high QOS of newest LLM, slip them a cheaper LLM, run their query at reduced quality. measure if they cost you fewer $s in the lower QOS. => profit.

      For chatgpt the arbitration opportunity looks more like "we could allocate this amount of gpu to training or inference, we are losing money if we offer the highest quality infra"

      In addition there's other interesting economics scaling that can be done outside of "models of models" that are far more profitable. I won't go over all of them (and some of them I feel are quite powerful) but the laziest one is that subscription models count on some zombie users as a counterweight to highly expensive single users, and as a source of stable cashflow.

      Zombie users are ones that are paying for sub but not actively or barely using the service

    • ssk42 11 minutes ago
      If I recall correctly, in their pivot to Codex they took a sizable amount of compute away from ChatGPT
  • brumar 2 hours ago
    After all, this "mode" was just a system prompt (last time I looked).
    • tomrod 2 hours ago
      Can it be replicated by a user?
      • shlewis 2 hours ago
        https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xeb/TheBigPromptLibrary/r...

        I think this is pretty much the entirety of study mode. Never used it before but as long as there's no UI changes, yes, it's 100% replicable.

      • box2 1 hour ago
        There used to be a “Custom GPT” feature which basically just creates a prompt wrapper with some extra functionality like being able to call web APIs for more data. Can’t seem to find that menu right now, but it would have easily replicated the study feature. Maybe it was limited to paid accounts only.
        • AmmarSaleh50 1 hour ago
          Yeah custom gpts are only for paid users. However u can create a new project under "Projects", name it, then when u create it, you can see on the top right the three dots button, click it, open project settings, and there u can place your system prompt under instructions. Every chat you start in that project would send those instructions as a system prompt to the model you are chatting with. so essentially "Study Mode" could be recreated with this approach, or at least it should.
        • alexthehurst 1 hour ago
          It’s still there, but the builder is only in the web UI.
  • m-hodges 1 hour ago
    I tried it a few times and always found it disappointing. It typically started off like a structured "lesson" but as I chatted with it, it would forget the syllabus is had proposed and we never "completed" the thing we set out to learn.
  • CatDeveloper_ 1 hour ago
    they do it with other stuff to i feel like they see how much users actually interact with those features and base their decsisoins kinda like how google owuld remove some features at random..
  • foundermodus 1 hour ago
    What was the Study Mode? I never saw it.
    • exitb 18 minutes ago
      Teaching the user how to solve problems instead of solving them outright.
  • el_io 2 hours ago
    Haven't use 'Study Mode' in OpenAI, but can't you just ask it to act as a study coach or whatever you want it to be?
  • Marciplan 11 minutes ago
    in regards of sunsetting, they are better at being Google than Google is at being Google
  • altmanaltman 1 hour ago
    I remember videos with titles like "OPENAI CHANGED STUDYING COMPLETELY WITH THIS ONE SUPER UPDATE!" and obnoxious thumbnails on youtube when it was first launched. I guess studying changed it.
    • ddtaylor 51 minutes ago
      Use DeArrow, it allows you to avoid most of that clickbait farming.
    • danielbln 1 hour ago
      You have these grifter videos for everything, from OpenAI features to hot takes on the strait of Hormuz. These are best ignored entirely.
      • altmanaltman 1 hour ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44725764

        Also discussed on HN. Yeah I can ignore them, but a lot of people watch those videos and fall for the grift (going by their views) and that's sad. It personally annoys me also when yt recommends them to me because it thinks I'm interested in software

        • ziml77 1 hour ago
          I make sure to hit not interested the second I see anything I very much don't want pop up in me feed. I don't want mine to drift towards the average feed of the lowest effort, sensationalist garbage.
          • newswasboring 1 hour ago
            Does this work? I've been doing that for some weeks now, nothing has changed about my home page.
  • utopiah 51 minutes ago
    Before this Sora, and before that large government contracts. I don't think they care so much for the random consumer anymore. They use anything and everyone for PR but they get closer to IPO they are focusing what actually might make them profitable.

    TL;DR: bet on stuff being removed

  • ok123456 1 hour ago
    Gemini still has its study mode.
  • shivang2607 37 minutes ago
    Do people even used that ?
    • iugtmkbdfil834 16 minutes ago
      Anecdotally, I did not even know it was a thing. I either went to tutor me explicitly or purposefully explored a given branch with custom prompts ( + book recommendations on the subject ).
  • janpmz 2 hours ago
    I was concerned about big players offering the same functionality when building listendock.com, but maybe there is a place for specialized apps like that.
  • jegudiel 1 hour ago
    I used to enjoy studying with ChatGPT too. I was on their Plus plan.
  • hadifrt20 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • pyalwin 1 hour ago
    [dead]