Where this was said
First Impressions: What 5.6 Feels Like to Use
At 9:20 · chapter starts 7:00
Theo and Ben dig into their actual day-to-day experience with 5.6, and the clearest signal emerges not from the model itself but from the regression to 5.5. Theo describes the single most noticeable change: 5.6 doesn't stop after the first part of a task and ask for permission to continue [1] — Theo "5.5→5.6 regression: 1/5th completion: When forced back to GPT-5.5 during testing, tasks that 5.6 happily ran to completion got only about a…" 08:10 . That habit was one of his biggest frustrations with 5.5, and with 5.6, it simply vanished. When forced back to 5.5 during testing windows, similar tasks got only about a fifth of the way through before stopping — a stark regression. Ben adds a philosophical point: the best AI is the one you don't notice [2] — Ben "I notice Phi-5 more than I notice the new model, which is huge. Like, that's what you want AI to do. If you notice it, it's bad." 09:20 . He'd previously thought 5.5 was so good that future model improvements would be imperceptible — he was entirely wrong. The hosts also flag the deeper cognitive dynamic: spending time with a better model raises your expectations, which then makes the older model feel far worse than it ever did before.
Once Theo and Ben spent time with GPT-5.6, returning to 5.5 wasn't just annoying — it was actively painful. Their mental bar for what an AI should do had been reset by the new model, so 5.5's tendency to stop mid-task and ask for permission felt far worse than it ever had before.
When forced back to GPT-5.5 during testing, tasks that 5.6 happily ran to completion got only about a fifth of the way through before stopping.
