We want to explain what happened, why it matters, and how we’re addressing sycophancy.

In last week’s GPT‑4o update, we made adjustments aimed at improving the model’s default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks.

When shaping model behavior, we start with baseline principles and instructions outlined in our Model Spec⁠(opens in a new window). We also teach our models how to apply these principles by incorporating user signals like thumbs-up / thumbs-down feedback on ChatGPT responses.

However, in this update, we focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.