# OpenAI o1

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/openai-o1/

6 people recommended OpenAI o1 in Hacker News comments, 6 had mixed feelings and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 12 months, in 6 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** More people criticize it than recommend it. People recommend o1 as an early step-change in AI reasoning on hard problems, though critics say its hype outran its real-world results and its price was high.

Summary written by Claude from the comments below.

## What people warn about

- Confident wrong answers persist (3 comments in the sample): "This has been a visible problem at least since o1, and the lack of change tells me they do not have a real solution." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46238203)) "an LLM will happily leap to a conclusion and deliver it with high confidence" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001851)) "LLMs (o1) gets the following type of question wrong" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035201))
- High cost for reasoning (3 comments in the sample): "All thinking does is burn output tokens for accuracy, it is the AI getting high on its own supply" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679664)) "technically o1-pro is even more expensive, but I'm assuming that's a "please move on" pricing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462110)) "Now, o1's price/performance seems like a distant bad dream." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610378))
- Hype exceeds real-world results (2 comments in the sample): "Hyped title. It was exclusively text-based diagnosis after physicians did the whole interview, exam, labs, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009708)) "it says the LLMs did not outperform any group of doctors in the most important cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009228))

## Why people recommend it

- Strong reasoning on hard questions (3 comments in the sample): "also give the correct answer (without web search" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816071)) "OpenAI's o3, o1 and 4.1 get it right first try" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816064)) "showed impressive reasoning capabilities" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214685))
- Major improvement over earlier models (2 comments in the sample): "Last time there was such hype for a model was "strawberry" (o1) then gpt-5…" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934608)) "around the time of o1/o3/Gemini 2.5 was when things changed and I haven’t looked back since" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758563))

## Other reasoning models people recommend

- [OpenAI o3](https://hackerapproved.com/p/o3/): 30 recommend, 5 mixed, 11 criticize
- [DeepSeek R1](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-r1/): 18 recommend, 6 mixed, 13 criticize
- [VibeThinker 3B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vibethinker-3b/): 17 recommend, 10 mixed, 8 criticize

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://openai.com/)

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "OpenAI o1", https://hackerapproved.com/p/openai-o1/ (6 recommend, 6 mixed, 9 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.