ChatGPT

Long-term owners

ChatGPT figured out in 5 minutes the reason behind a pretty serious chronic problem that her very good doctors hadn't been able to figure out in 3 years

Jan 2026 · comment

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Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 7377 comments. Each links to the original.

1. To OpenAI's credit, when they realized ChatGPT 4o was overly sycophantic they did roll it back pretty quickly, but I'm pretty sure the speed with which they've been moving they've glossed over a lot of issues.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]”

2. ChatGPT was surprisingly helpful. If you put in the work to truly understand the where the gaps are in your mental model, it can do an amazing job filling in the gaps.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “How to build a diffusion language model”

3. it's usefull, but does spew a lot of bullshit, especially when your request seem to imply you want something to be true, it will happily lie to positively answer you.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Richard Stallman on ChatGPT”

4. Rubber-ducking your symptoms for free for as long as you need and then asking a doctor for their 2-minute opinion is IMHO the best way to go about healthcare in 2026.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Introducing ChatGPT Health”

5. It's very good at quickly searching and surfacing relevant information online, and that's helpful, but if I did not have a lot of experience at linux administration

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes”

6. It's definitely faster than searching everything on my own, but whether the information is reliable still depends on personal judgment or asking a real doctor.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others”

7. In thinking mode it would have said "wow this guy's EQ is like negative 20" before saying saying "you're absolute right! what if you ignored that entirely!"

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]”

8. I fed all the data I got into ChatGPT deep research and it came back with an NIH study that said 25% of people in a study had localized allergic reactions

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Introducing ChatGPT Health”

9. LLMs are great at surfacing the unknown unknowns, and I think can help people better prepare for the rare 5 minutes they get to speak to an actual doctor.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others”

10. ChatGPT figured out in 5 minutes the reason behind a pretty serious chronic problem that her very good doctors hadn't been able to figure out in 3 years

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Introducing ChatGPT Health”

11. for basic questions it's serviceable (though the number of responses that cite just Youtube videos means my skepticism for its output validity remains)

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “ChatGPT lost 22 points of web share in a year”

12. I fully agree with the assessment it was "reasonably well". It is not, however, something equivalent to the product of a disciplined TDD practitioner.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Writing code is cheap now”

13. There is a surprisingly high chance chatbot can just give the exact answer back to me, usually with extra interesting reading materials as a plus.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep”

14. Its also a teaching machine. There are several classes I had in college I would have killed for ChatGPT to cut through the terrible instruction.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “A University System Went All in on A.I. Now It's Tearing Itself Apart”

15. I pay for and use their product, it works for my use cases, but watching the business deals and weird quotes from a far makes me less confidant.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Atlantic: Sam Altman Is Losing His Grip on Humanity”

16. Then I ended up getting a $20/month ChatGPT account and that comes with codex and now I can't imagine sitting there Googling a problem anymore.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription”

17. ChatGPT has made a material difference in my ability to understand health problems, test results, and to communicate with doctors effectively.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “ChatGPT Health Is a Marketplace, Guess Who Is the Product?”

18. I’ve asked ChatGPT to rewrite an email for me "so that I come across as a reasonable human being rather than a deranged psychopath". It works.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills”

19. identifying grammatical mistakes, contradictory statements, ambiguous sentences, and tone mismatch for a given character has been very helpful

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others”

20. if they don't have access to chats but they find out the enchilada ad was performing the best, something like this can provide enough information to be used to know about peoples private chats

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Testing Ads in ChatGPT”

21. My treating doctor (EU country) asked ChatGPT for a recommendation for my case, as she didn't have much experience with my particular condition. Guess what? The recommendation was wrong

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product”

22. I asked an earlier iteration of ChatGPT to build a probability model based on the FIFA tournament pools / brackets and current bookkeepers' odds. It made a complete mess of things

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Ask HN: How (if at all) are you leveraging LLMs?”

23. You're probably not using OpenAI models for complex or non-standard tasks. It shits the best just as often as Qwen when you need precision and detail in a non-obvious problem.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking”

24. ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you're just trading one master for another.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit”

25. Degrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on "prompt relevance"”

26. If I ask Claude or ChatGPT to generate terraform for non-trivial but by no means obscure or highly unusual setups, they almost invariably hallucinate part of the answer

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Don't fall into the anti-AI hype”

27. The Result was garbage. It took me a while to get the result I had gotten consistently last time, and the results included it hallucinating a few svgs in the process.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “It's not empowering to hand off the details”

28. It works fine, avoids falling into trap due to misleading question. Probably works even better for more popular technologies. Yeah, it has higher failure rates but it's not a dealbreaker for non-autonomous use cases.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview”

29. Type "Polar plot 6 curves of the form r = (1 + Sin[2^(k - 1) t]/2^(k - 1)) where k =1, 2, .., 6 and t=0 to 2 Pi each curve should be a different color" into ChatGPT5.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Venn Diagram for 7 Sets”

30. I found that ChatGPT was greatly improved personality-wise from where it had been when I left, and now in my opinion is a better experience than the Claude models.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Claude is a Contrarian”

31. ChatGPT both told me exactly why from the model number (had to disconnect a part), found a new part, and told me step by step how that part would be taken out.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI?”

32. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (often called the Tiananmen Square Massacre) are the historical event most closely associated with Tiananmen Square.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “GLM-5.3-Flash”

33. I must admit I spent a little time in ChatGPT this weekend, thinking I was in Codex. After some unexpected behavior (disappointed) I realized my mistake.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude”

34. Its rate of hallucinations is low enough that I don't feel like the default assumption of any solution is that it is trying to hide a mistake somewhere.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro”

35. Honestly kind of a great take. But also. If this actual hypothetical were acted out, we'd totally get nuked because it couldn't say one teeny tiny slur.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models”

36. I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Feeling Sad about AI”

37. I tried again and it worked. It seems like I have to ask for it to do things "in the container" or it will just give me directions about how to do it.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files”

38. I asked him to simulate a text-based adventure (based on the discworld universe) and every command I gave it would behave as an open world text RPG.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Nano Banana is so good that you can use it to play a RPG at 1 frame a minute”

39. As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.”

40. At times the advice is genuinely helpful. However, it's practically impossible to measure under what exact situations the advice would be accurate.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others”