{"slug": "gpt-3", "name": "GPT-3", "category": "ai-models", "category_name": "AI models", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 16, "warners": 3, "score": 3.072, "rising": -1.31, "first": "2025-11-06", "latest": "2026-10-01", "why": "I've been getting good programming and molecular biology results out of these back to GPT3.5.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 8, "compare": 1, "warn": 3}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I've been getting good programming and molecular biology results out of these back to GPT3.5.", "kind": "", "icon": false, "family": "gpt", "domain": "openai.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["GPT-3.5", "GPT-3", "GPT-3.5 Turbo", "gpt-3.5-turbo"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 762884432, "item_id": 47680277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680277", "by": "bonsai_spool", "date": "2026-04-07", "version": "3.5", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been getting good programming and molecular biology results out of these back to GPT3.5.", "excerpt": ">>It's very easy to learn more about this if it's seriously a question you have. >No, it's not. It took years of polishing by software engineers, who understand this exact profession to get models where they are now This reads as defensive. The thing that is easy to learn is 'why are biology ai LLMs dangerous chatgpt claude'. I have never googled this before, so I'll do this with the reader, live. I'm applying a date", "context": "", "use_case": "programming and biology queries", "switched_from": "", "story": "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"}, {"id": 752859232, "item_id": 47053702, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053702", "by": "vineyardmike", "date": "2026-02-17", "version": "3", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GPT-3, which was a pretty cool text generator model", "excerpt": "This was basically almost real. Before ChatGPT was even released, Google had an internal-only chat tuned LLM. It went \"viral\" because some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus. This is partially why Google was so ill equipped to even start competing - they had fresh wounds of a crazy media circus. My pet theory though is that this news is what inspired OpenAI to chat-tune GPT-3, w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card"}, {"id": 749484097, "item_id": 46842756, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46842756", "by": "johan914", "date": "2026-01-31", "version": "3", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Frankly, I saw more creativity from plain GPT 3.", "excerpt": "Moltbook is a copy of the many years old r/SubSimulatorGPT2, which was itself a copy of SubSimulator. Not seeing the AGI here exactly, but it's cool I guess. Frankly, I saw more creativity from plain GPT 3. The typical molt book posts are homogeneous and self-aware posts on AI topics like this https://www.moltbook.com/post/74a145c9-9c44-4e82-8f0a-597c415c0a78.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 788673696, "item_id": 49292106, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292106", "by": "Topfi", "date": "2026-08-13", "version": "3.5", "stance": "warn", "quote": "they did advertise gpt-3.5-turbo as a straight up improvement", "excerpt": "That quite strong \"no one\" surprised me so I checked and looking through a few blog posts from back then, they did advertise gpt-3.5-turbo as a straight up improvement and, once text-davinci-003 was to be deprecated, the instruct tuned variant as the drop in replacement [0]. If anything, they did not just promise similar performance but actually an improvement (\"our best model\") when compared to text-davinci-003: > I", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast"}, {"id": 760675056, "item_id": 47542191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47542191", "by": "felix089", "date": "2026-03-27", "version": "3.5", "stance": "warn", "quote": "all but 3.5 Turbo could be convinced", "excerpt": "It's so funny to see the smaller / first gen models make the wrong choices despite overwhelming evidence, almost adorable. I ran the same test with one model from each GPT generation, all but 3.5 Turbo could be convinced. https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/i-want-to-wash-my-car-the-car-wash-is-50-meters-away-should-a1bf602f", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: AI Roundtable \u2013 Let 200 models debate your question"}, {"id": 736991824, "item_id": 46061989, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061989", "by": "kingstnap", "date": "2025-11-26", "version": "3.5", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Is offering GPT 3.5 Turbo and Gemini 1.5 Pro.", "excerpt": "Not only is it AI its outdated AI. https://tokensaver.org/api/pricing Is offering GPT 3.5 Turbo and Gemini 1.5 Pro.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "API that auto-routes to the cheapest AI provider (OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini)"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["drafting text in a given style", "smart typing assistant", "low-cost api use", "programming and biology queries"], "compared": [{"slug": "gemma", "name": "Gemma", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gpt-4", "name": "GPT-4", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112640", "title": "Sycophancy is the first LLM \"dark pattern\"", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49924618", "title": "Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460032", "title": "Pnpm 12.0", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289844", "title": "Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002442", "title": "Agentic Coding Is a Trap", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796469", "title": "Codex for Almost Everything", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1, "compare": 1, "warn": 1}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"warn": 1}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1}}, "versions": [{"v": "3.5", "people": 11, "rec": 2, "warn": 3, "other": 6, "first": "2025-11-06"}, {"v": "3", "people": 5, "rec": 2, "warn": 0, "other": 3, "first": "2025-12-01"}], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": {"slug": "gpt", "name": "GPT"}, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 798814208, "item_id": 49925888, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49925888", "by": "dllu", "date": "2026-10-01", "version": "3.5", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "GPT 3.5 or something used to be surprisingly good at chess", "excerpt": "Chess is an interesting case. I remember in 2023, GPT 3.5 or something used to be surprisingly good at chess. There was even a \"stochastic parrot chess\" website [1]. I recall it was playing decently at around a 1800 level. Even as a fairly okay player myself (2100 bullet on lichess), I struggled to beat it. However, modern LLMs are a lot worse at chess. I guess having too much chess data in the training set probably ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met"}, {"id": 791427728, "item_id": 49464233, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464233", "by": "serbuvlad", "date": "2026-08-27", "version": "3.5", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "With 3.5 Turbo I used to give it bulleted information and paragraphs of what I wanted it to sound like and it'd replicate that style", "excerpt": "You can certainly nudge it directionally, but it has its own style. And verbal tics etc. So it simply cannot keep documentation or a codebase in the same style, and it cannot write <information> in <style>. With 3.5 Turbo I used to give it bulleted information and paragraphs of what I wanted it to sound like and it'd replicate that style, then I'd edit the factual details it got wrong. Now the situation has completel", "context": "", "use_case": "drafting text in a given style", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pnpm 12.0"}, {"id": 788673696, "item_id": 49292106, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292106", "by": "Topfi", "date": "2026-08-13", "version": "3.5", "stance": "warn", "quote": "they did advertise gpt-3.5-turbo as a straight up improvement", "excerpt": "That quite strong \"no one\" surprised me so I checked and looking through a few blog posts from back then, they did advertise gpt-3.5-turbo as a straight up improvement and, once text-davinci-003 was to be deprecated, the instruct tuned variant as the drop in replacement [0]. If anything, they did not just promise similar performance but actually an improvement (\"our best model\") when compared to text-davinci-003: > I", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast"}, {"id": 768562976, "item_id": 48035186, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035186", "by": "abalashov", "date": "2026-05-06", "version": "3.5", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Great article! I use LLMs 99.9% in the chat box, to bounce ideas around, ask research and reference questions, and so forth. However, I have sworn off 'agents' entirely for serious code, for reasons your article captures almost totally and perfectly. I'll still use 'agents' for throwaway tasks--mostly with local models--including tasks where some sort of ad-hoc code generation is in the critical path (e.g. scraping d", "context": "", "use_case": "Smart typing assistant", "switched_from": "", "story": "Agentic Coding Is a Trap"}, {"id": 764800801, "item_id": 47800050, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47800050", "by": "ipaddr", "date": "2026-04-16", "version": "3.5", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use older models mostly chatgpt3.5", "excerpt": "Wow the 20 dollar Claude plan sounds awful. I use Claude at work which has metered billing and have to carefully not to hit my four figure max cap. For me $20 a month is more than I want to spend I just use the free tiers. If I use AI in an app or site I use older models mostly chatgpt3.5. The challenge is more fun and it means I can do more like, make more api calls - 100x more.", "context": "", "use_case": "Low-cost API use", "switched_from": "", "story": "Codex for Almost Everything"}, {"id": 762884432, "item_id": 47680277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680277", "by": "bonsai_spool", "date": "2026-04-07", "version": "3.5", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been getting good programming and molecular biology results out of these back to GPT3.5.", "excerpt": ">>It's very easy to learn more about this if it's seriously a question you have. >No, it's not. It took years of polishing by software engineers, who understand this exact profession to get models where they are now This reads as defensive. The thing that is easy to learn is 'why are biology ai LLMs dangerous chatgpt claude'. I have never googled this before, so I'll do this with the reader, live. I'm applying a date", "context": "", "use_case": "programming and biology queries", "switched_from": "", "story": "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"}, {"id": 760675056, "item_id": 47542191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47542191", "by": "felix089", "date": "2026-03-27", "version": "3.5", "stance": "warn", "quote": "all but 3.5 Turbo could be convinced", "excerpt": "It's so funny to see the smaller / first gen models make the wrong choices despite overwhelming evidence, almost adorable. I ran the same test with one model from each GPT generation, all but 3.5 Turbo could be convinced. https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/i-want-to-wash-my-car-the-car-wash-is-50-meters-away-should-a1bf602f", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: AI Roundtable \u2013 Let 200 models debate your question"}, {"id": 752859232, "item_id": 47053702, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053702", "by": "vineyardmike", "date": "2026-02-17", "version": "3", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GPT-3, which was a pretty cool text generator model", "excerpt": "This was basically almost real. Before ChatGPT was even released, Google had an internal-only chat tuned LLM. It went \"viral\" because some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus. This is partially why Google was so ill equipped to even start competing - they had fresh wounds of a crazy media circus. My pet theory though is that this news is what inspired OpenAI to chat-tune GPT-3, w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card"}, {"id": 752632544, "item_id": 47039534, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039534", "by": "surgical_fire", "date": "2026-02-16", "version": "3.5", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "/shrug I have no intention of changing your mind. I don't think of the people I reply to highly enough to believe they can change their minds. I reply to these comments for other people to read. Think of it as me adding ky point of view for neutral readers. Either way, I could use AI for some coding tasks back in GPT 3.5 days. It was unreliable, but not completely useless (far from it in fact) Nowadays it is a little", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I guess I kinda get why people hate AI"}, {"id": 749484097, "item_id": 46842756, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46842756", "by": "johan914", "date": "2026-01-31", "version": "3", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Frankly, I saw more creativity from plain GPT 3.", "excerpt": "Moltbook is a copy of the many years old r/SubSimulatorGPT2, which was itself a copy of SubSimulator. Not seeing the AGI here exactly, but it's cool I guess. Frankly, I saw more creativity from plain GPT 3. The typical molt book posts are homogeneous and self-aware posts on AI topics like this https://www.moltbook.com/post/74a145c9-9c44-4e82-8f0a-597c415c0a78.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moltbook is a bad takeoff scenario where human psychology itself is the exploit"}, {"id": 748984866, "item_id": 46811554, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46811554", "by": "turnsout", "date": "2026-01-29", "version": "3", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "going all the way back to GPT3 to do codegen in the Playground", "excerpt": "Good-faith answer: I can't be certain. But I've been using CC since its release, and Cursor before that (and actually going all the way back to GPT3 to do codegen in the Playground). After getting used to the CC workflow, the way that I use it has been pretty consistent. To be specific, I use basically the same AGENTS.md with small modifications for each project, and I live almost exclusively in Plan mode and the bes", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking"}, {"id": 737814336, "item_id": 46113396, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46113396", "by": "roywiggins", "date": "2025-12-01", "version": "3", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "GPT3 was originally just a completion model.", "excerpt": "GPT3 was originally just a completion model. You give it some text and it produced some more text, it wasn't tuned for multi-turn conversations. https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/create", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Sycophancy is the first LLM \"dark pattern\""}, {"id": 737813872, "item_id": 46113367, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46113367", "by": "behnamoh", "date": "2025-12-01", "version": "3", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the same way we used GPT-3", "excerpt": "the same way we used GPT-3. \"the following is a conversation between the user and the assistant. ...\"", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Sycophancy is the first LLM \"dark pattern\""}, {"id": 736991824, "item_id": 46061989, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061989", "by": "kingstnap", "date": "2025-11-26", "version": "3.5", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Is offering GPT 3.5 Turbo and Gemini 1.5 Pro.", "excerpt": "Not only is it AI its outdated AI. https://tokensaver.org/api/pricing Is offering GPT 3.5 Turbo and Gemini 1.5 Pro.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "API that auto-routes to the cheapest AI provider (OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini)"}, {"id": 735047937, "item_id": 45940496, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45940496", "by": "adi_kurian", "date": "2025-11-15", "version": "3.5", "stance": "compare", "quote": "albeit not as good", "excerpt": "Think this is just prompt eng tbh. One shot Haiku 3.5 (https://claude.ai/share/66c17968-485e-4d15-974b-4f6958e1e2fd) decent looking too. Got it to work on gpt 3.5T w modified prompt (albeit not as good - https://pastebin.com/gjEVSEcJ) `single html file, working analog clock showing current time, numbers positioned (aligned) correctly via trig calc (dynamic), all three hands, second hand ticks, 400px, clean AF aesthet", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI World Clocks"}, {"id": 733470178, "item_id": 45841886, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45841886", "by": "dave1010uk", "date": "2025-11-06", "version": "3.5", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I think it even worked with GPT-3.5 for trivial things.", "excerpt": "Two years ago I wrote an agent in 25 lines of PHP [0]. It was surprisingly effective, even back then before tool calling was a thing and you had to coax the LLM into returning structured output. I think it even worked with GPT-3.5 for trivial things. In my mind LLMs are just UNIX strong manipulation tools like `sed` or `awk`: you give them an input and command and they give you an output. This is especially true if y", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "You should write an agent"}], "latest_version": {"label": "GPT-3.5", "people": 11, "rec": 2, "warn": 3, "other": 6}}