When it came to storytelling, Opus has been my go-to model for over a year now. Back then Opus 3 had been miles ahead from OpenAI models (anything else had been just plain embarrassing). Over that year it seemed like GPT was getting progressively worse while Claude improved. Just two weeks ago GPT-5.4 vs Opus 4.6 was almost unfair, mildly tinkered-upon Opus put out objectively good prose, while GPT was every bad AI story you've ever read on Facebook.
Then last week came and 4.7 dropped. And I couldn't believe how absolutely horseshit it was at telling stories. Dialogues that didn't make sense. Hallucinating shit that didn't make sense. Staying with 4.6 was an option so I told myself it was fine, they'll polish it or the next model will be better.
And then they said they'll be deprecating 4.6 in June. Suddenly keeping the 5x Max for purely personal purposes didn't make sense.
And today GPT-5.5 dropped. Knowing the hot mess 5.4 was I had zero expectations, typed in my usual story prompt I use to test all new models.
And, goddamnit, it's good. Not 4.6 good. But miles removed from the hot garbage 5.4 or 4.7 are. There is a feeling of freshness to is. I laughed at places I didn't expect to. It's good.
I don't want to support OpenAI and Sam Altman. But if Anthropic deprecates the only currently usable model for my purposes, I don't think I'll have a choice.
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