The New Models Feel Corporate — Please Keep 5.1 Available

GPT-5.3 Instant has several serious problems: Extremely poor context retention and memory. Responses often contain little or no useful information. It frequently misunderstands rhetorical language and interprets it literally. Even when the user clearly clarifies their meaning, the model ignores the clarification and argues against scenarios the user has already addressed. Hallucinations appear far more frequently than they did in GPT-5.1. GPT-5.4 Thinking has different but equally serious issues: It frequently mixes Chinese with other languages unexpectedly, which makes responses difficult to read. The writing style is overly rigid and formulaic, almost like bureaucratic template writing. It often incorrectly interprets advantages as problems and follows a fixed pattern of “praise first, then criticize,” even when such criticism is irrelevant. Because of these issues, neither GPT-5.3 Instant nor GPT-5.4 Thinking can replace GPT-5.1 in real use.