Tell HN: OpenAI silently removed Study Mode from ChatGPT (undefined)
152 points by smokel 7 hours ago
Here's hoping that it will return soon, as I really liked it.
brumar 6 hours ago
After all, this "mode" was just a system prompt (last time I looked).
toomanyrichies 4 hours ago
Your comment made me ask myself: "Then why remove it? If it really is just a system prompt, I can't imagine tech debt or maintenance are among the reasons."
My best guess is this is product strategy. A markdown file doesn't require maintenance, but a feature's surface area does. Every exposed mode is another thing to document, support, A/B test, and explain to new users who stumble across it. I'm guessing that someone decided "Study Mode isn't hitting retention metrics", and decided to kill it. As an autodidact, I loved the feature, but as a software engineer I can respect the decision.
What I'm wondering about is whether there's a security angle to this as well. Assuming exposed system prompts are a jailbreak surface, if users can infer the prompt structure, would it make certain prompt injection attacks easier? I'm not well-versed in ML security, and I'd be curious to hear from someone who is.
vineyardmike 2 hours ago
Re: product strategy
Honestly, it probably led to long conversations. The tokens/GPU time for one long conversation is more expensive than multiple short conversations. They’re trying to shore up their finances, and they’re moving away from the consumer market and towards enterprise, and students were probably a bad demographic to sell to.
raincole 3 hours ago
I think it's just that AI isn't that accurate and they've observed some backfire from teachers/students.
beering 3 hours ago
But also, if you liked the feature, can’t you just ask chatgpt to tutor you? Does it work as well as the pre-baked Study Mode?
tomrod 6 hours ago
Can it be replicated by a user?
shlewis 6 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.
ekjhgkejhgk 3 hours ago
box2 6 hours 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 5 hours ago
alexthehurst 5 hours ago
drivebyhooting 2 hours ago
I’ve tried using it for working through AIME. It was ok, but significantly worse than a human teacher.
It generally knew how to solve the questions, but does not know how to properly scaffold the solution. It mostly just prompts simple calculations, rather than guide to get the insight. What’s worse is that ChatGPT would occasionally disagree with my calculation because it can’t do arithmetic!
trashface 2 hours ago
They do stuff like that. They also killed "Robot" personality last year which was my favorite. The replaced it with "Efficient" or something, but it isn't the same. Robot was terminator-esq, appropriate for the new age we are entering IMO.
Lwerewolf 2 hours ago
This.
They recently made "efficient" even more verbose, my custom instructions can't suppress it properly anymore.
These "little" changes are incredibly annoying.
reactordev 2 hours ago
they are trying to burn your tokens on purpose to make you spend more... like introducing limits but making it so API requests continue, at cost...
Lwerewolf an hour ago
hbcondo714 an hour ago
The also removed Chat mode (from their Codex VSCode extension):
treetalker 3 hours ago
FWIW, Kagi Assistant still has a Study mode / custom assistant. It works well and I use it a few times per week.
r4sz 32 minutes ago
We silently remove OAI
m-hodges 5 hours 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_ 6 hours 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..
el_io 6 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?
foundermodus 6 hours ago
What was the Study Mode? I never saw it.
exitb 4 hours ago
Teaching the user how to solve problems instead of solving them outright.
bko 2 hours ago
I think its prob enough to do a prompt. Isn't that what these things are? Probably had some extra scaffolding before but now engine is good enough where just saying help me study results in the same results.
I personally dont want modes. It should be smart enough to infer my intention and act accordingly
derrida 4 hours 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
that is scary ... bonus ghastly incantations of the epistemology of middle management
coffeefirst an hour ago
That's how ChatGPT always seemed to me. One of the reasons I exclusively use other models is it would rather make something up than say "I can't find anything about that."
But I'm starting to wonder about something.
I've noticed a lot of people claiming the models—all the models from all the big providers—are deteriorating, and then go on to describe the problems that skeptics picked up on during their first few days of usage.
The models really could be getting worse. I haven't noticed anything but I don't know.
But do you think its possible that this is more akin to a honeymoon period? Depending on how you use the system and a fair bit of luck, the problems may show up for you pretty early, or may take a while to become obvious.
suburban_strike 4 hours ago
It's gotten bad enough that I finally cancelled this month in protest. It's not just you.
beering 3 hours ago
Set your default mode to thinking and set some custom instructions. Night and day difference in UX.
omgJustTest 4 hours 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
graerg 3 hours ago
They made a big point of explicitly advertising this as a feature with the GPT-5 rollout, no? Routing to cheaper models/less reasoning depending on the input prompt.
ssk42 4 hours ago
If I recall correctly, in their pivot to Codex they took a sizable amount of compute away from ChatGPT
enejej 2 hours ago
All models are variable in quality simply because they need to do some financial engineering to make the financial standing somewhat healthier. There’s a lot of fear in the market and need for signalling around the viability of the business of llm models and generating returns on invested capital.
layer8 3 hours ago
Are you using the free or the paid version? Did you try personalization settings other than the default?
MattRix 4 hours ago
I think you have it set to the wrong mode. If you set it to Thinking with “Extended” thinking effort, is it slower but almost never wrong (because it searches the web to get verify all its assumptions and answers).
beering 3 hours ago
Yeah I set thinking as my default and never looked back. It’s my daily driver and extended thinking is usually not too slow. The way that the “instant” model trades quality for speed is not worth it and I don’t need the instant gratification. (But I also don’t do entertainment chatting so ymmv.)
antonvs 2 hours ago
Are you using the free service or paid? Because when the free service drops back to older or smaller models, there are noticeable quality differences.
> ghastly incantations of the epistemology of middle management
I mean, LLM writing has been like that from the early on. Its most perfect niche for writing is the LinkedIn blog post.
altmanaltman 6 hours 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 5 hours ago
Use DeArrow, it allows you to avoid most of that clickbait farming.
sitkack 4 hours ago
danielbln 6 hours 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 6 hours 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 5 hours ago
paulcole 2 hours ago
How would they remove it loudly?
jdthedisciple an hour ago
By announcing it?
janpmz 6 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.
ok123456 5 hours ago
Gemini still has its study mode.
utopiah 5 hours 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
jegudiel 5 hours ago
I used to enjoy studying with ChatGPT too. I was on their Plus plan.
tmpz22 3 hours ago
Do you remember anything you “studied”?
FergusArgyll an hour ago
I do, bwrap.
It's not very complicated and I actually wanted to learn it. AI doesn't make learning magically easier, but it writes decent quizzes and debugs answers so it's better than just reading the manual
shivang2607 5 hours ago
Do people even used that ?
iugtmkbdfil834 4 hours 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 ).
Marciplan 4 hours ago
in regards of sunsetting, they are better at being Google than Google is at being Google
enejej 2 hours ago
Another piece of evidence that shows OAI has no vision and taste re. Project selection.
Describes this whole LLM hype really. Will be jarring if it ends up being that the value created (in terms of revenues) is mostly around software production.