OpenAI Adds Old Models Back - DTNSB 5081

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

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2:21Jenn Cutter: this is the daily tech news for wednesday august 13th 2025 we tell you what you need to know we follow up on context and by gosh we do our best to help each other understand this crazy world today open ai backtracks on model selection and the new pebble time 2 gets closer to reality i'm excited i'm tom merit i'm jen cutter let's start with what you need to know with the big story. So Jen, did you hear everybody grumbling? Did you hear the grumbling up there in Toronto of OpenAI users? A lot of grumbling. And I had a little bit of sympathy because everyone I think has had things where they worked on something, they came back and, oh no, it's all gone.

2:59Jenn Cutter: Why is it not there? That's how I do my work. Well, OpenAI has restored access to older models in ChatGPT and given users some more control over which version they use. If you missed it, OpenAI removed all previous models when it launched GPT-5 with the idea that its new router would be able to tell from your query which model was best. Now, that's probably fine for most users once it started working properly, but some had very specific reasons for using other models, and others just didn't like change or having their choice take away. At first, OpenAI restored the 4.0 model for paying users. That is now listed in the dropdown under Legacy Models if you have access to it.

3:42Jenn Cutter: OpenAI has now created a toggle in settings, so you'll need to go find it, called Show Additional Models. And if you turn that on, you get 03, 4.1, and five Thinking Mini as choice items. If you pay$200 a month for the pro version, you also get 4.5. Has this made anyone you know happier? Yes. I think those people may also be slightly overly attached to particular models, possibly. I'll give OpenAI credit for saying, you know what? Enough people want it. Let's just give it to them. And they gave it to them in a way that users who don't care don't have to deal with it too. Yeah. For people who didn't notice, they're fine.

4:27And then for people like me who are hyper-specific about where I want my UI and stuff, I understand the feelings.

4:34Jenn Cutter: OpenAI also is giving you the option to choose between auto, fast, and thinking models for GPT-5. And again, same thing we were just talking about. Auto will just use the router to choose the mode, and that's the default selection. So if you don't want to think, you don't have to. But if you're like, no, I actually want to use the reasoning model, give me thinking. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said the company is working to make the personality of 5 warmer without returning it to the sycophantic personality of 4.0. he added one learning for us from the past few days is we really just need to get to a world with more per user customization of model personality yeah it's definitely gonna be tricky from their end because they're like the router will help them not waste compute models on the most basic of things but if everybody has their own personality in their own chat doesn't it take up a ton of computing problems too yeah it depends on how they implement it and I guess that's what he's saying that they're going to try to solve.

5:36Jenn Cutter: OpenAI also rolled out support for Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Context Connectors if you're in that$200 a month pro service. If you're a Plus, Team, Enterprise, or EduPlan holder, you'll get it in the coming weeks. That's the one that lets you connect those services so you can ask questions related to your docs or calendar, et cetera. And ChatGPT can then look at that information to help find answers to them. You could already do Gmail and Calendar in deep research. So if you already connected them there, it'll now connect to the other services as well. This probably gives some people the heebie-jeebies, but it's not constant access.

6:14Jenn Cutter: Although you do have to trust OpenAI won't abuse it. It's just using it when you tell it to. Yeah, I had always assumed that those were actually referenced in terms of the, like, ask the AI to do this for you and wouldn't have added it anyway. So I think, yeah, the people who wanted to use this were probably already using it. Yeah. Can you look at my calendar and tell me, like, what's the best time to schedule XOBW day? That kind of stuff. Uh, finally, an interesting write-up from Doug O 'Loughlin, uh, along with Dylan Patel, Weijo, and AJ Kurabi on semi-analysis proposes that this router, uh, I know when we say router, everybody's probably thinking of it like a D-link or something, but it's just, it's just routing your query to the right model, uh, that the router in GPT-5 might set the stage for open AI to monetize free users in the future.

7:02Jenn Cutter: You should totally read this full story. Uh, it's a good write-up and they go into great detail on their reasoning. But the short version is that the router can tell when a query could be handled by a cheaper-to-use model like Mini and save queries that could lead to things like referrals for the more expensive compute. The example they give is you're asking for legal advice and it says, ah, we're going to use the more expensive model because then we can pick the legal person from them and get a cut of the referral for sending them along to the lawyer. Instacart added a feature in January that lets agents check out products, which is kind of along the road to this.

7:38Jenn Cutter: And they pointed out that Fiji Simo was CEO of Instacart when that was rolled out in January, and she is now head of product at OpenAI. So it seems clear that they might want to pursue that kind of thing. Jen, what do you think of a free chatbot that doesn't give you ads, but still can make money off your purchases? Yeah, well, I had to figure out what that Instacart thing was about, because I had missed that news. I was like, okay, I look this up and they're like, oh, you can tell the agent, hey, I want to make this fancy recipe. So you read it and you put all the necessary things in my cart.

8:14And I was like, okay, that makes sense. That is helpful. I don't quite understand quite how OpenAI is going to benefit from this. Like what kind of referrals? Like, are they going to get kickbacks from something?

8:28Jenn Cutter: Yeah, that's exactly what this means. When the agent goes out and finds the lawyer to help you deal with your speeding ticket, OpenAI would get a cut of the referral to that lawyer. Now, what they kind of waved away in the semi-analysis piece was this would not degrade the advice of the model, but give OpenAI money. And the way referrals usually work is we will prominently display your link and get a cut from it if you do an agreement with us. Because otherwise, people are like, why do I need to give you a cut if you're going to link to me anyway? And that's the part that's missing for me here is how do you not degrade the answer when I say, give me the best lawyer, when you've got some lawyers who you get a referral from and some you don't?

9:21Because I know that for Google, when you want to be in a specific category, specific words, you're paying Google. You're bidding for that spot. Yeah.

9:29Jenn Cutter: You want to show up higher than everybody else. So is OpenAI going to run a parallel system to that? Well, the closest thing I can think of is when I was at CNET, we had a referral program for links. And so some manufacturers, we would put a special link in any of our coverage, and then we would get a referral fee if someone were to click on that link. there was always a tension between treating all products equally, whether we got a referral or not. Uh, and you know, the idea that like, well, why are they giving us a referral if, you know, if we're not giving them special, uh, promotion. And I was on the end of fighting, like I, as an editorial person have to treat all the links the same.

10:12Jenn Cutter: Uh, so, you know, don't, don't make me not run a headline because, well, that one doesn't have any referrals in the links. So yeah, I'm curious how OpenAI would deal with that. Maybe it's a challenge to the listeners. Like if you can solve that and say, here's how they could not affect the quality of their answers and still make a quality referral program, I'd love to hear about it. And I'd love to see how fast they get something like this out the door because, hey, Christmas is coming. If there was ever a time to get referral money, you probably know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a good point.

10:45Jenn Cutter: I guess OpenAI is not worried about becoming profitable on the free version today. So if they didn't get it by this holiday season, they'd get it by next holiday season. It'd be fine. But there could be some added pressure to be like, let's try something out this holiday. That's interesting. I do like the idea of referrals over ads. I don't like the idea of seeing display ads, and it does not sound like OpenAI would do that. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Kevin Morgan, Paul Thiessen, Ali Sanjabi, and John Murray III. Yay!

11:24This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. It calls to us. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to Or the succulents that adorn our homes Nature makes all of our lives richer, calmer, and frankly, better Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it But the outdoors is closer than we realize With AllTrails, you can discover trails nearby or trails worth traveling to and explore confidently with offline maps and on-trail navigation.

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15:04Jenn Cutter: Hey, there's more we need to know today. That's why we give you the briefs. If you missed it, Eric Mijakovsky is bringing back the Pebble Watch, e-paper screen and everything and even got the rights to use the Pebble name. In an episode of his podcast, Tick Talk, T-I-C-K, T-O-K, Michikowski gave an update on the Pebble Time 2's final design. It'll be available in black and silver with a blue or red accent made of a polycarbonate stripe in between the stainless steel casing material included to let the radios work better. There's also an RGB LED backlight to let you customize colors and let them change automatically through the day.

15:46And there will be a compass after all, if you've been following any back and forth on that. You can pre-order the Pebble Time 2 for$225 for shipping in December, though the final price and shipping may yet change. There's also a survey coming for those who pre-ordered the yet-to-ship Pebble 2 Duo to let them change their order to the Time 2.

16:08Jenn Cutter: Yeah, this is all going well, except for the shipping. They were supposed to ship the Duo in July. In fact, it still says July on the official order page. Now he's saying, late August, maybe September, but I'll send a survey before that if you want to switch to the time. Time's supposed to ship by December, but there's still a lot of... I can't tell if he's actually going to be able to ship this or not, but he's showing us the progress. He's showing us the design and it's a working model. So I still have faith. I also wonder just how big this market is, but I know there's enough enthusiasm for the Pebble that he'll at least have a good first round of orders.

16:48Yeah. Well, I showed this to some people who backed the original Pebble and they're like, what? When did this happen? I think they're going to have to push harder to get the original market back, but they've definitely reached some new people here.

17:02Jenn Cutter: Pony AI says that it has 200 robo-taxis on the road now and is on track to have a thousand by the end of the year. If it reaches that thousand vehicle mark, it said it will be break-even per vehicle. Its monetization plan will be working at break-even levels, though they won't be losing money anymore. The Guangzhou China-based company says it'll start exploring expansion to Europe at that point. It operates now in China, of course, has a tie-up with Uber in Dubai and is testing vehicles in South Korea. This is surprisingly open. You don't see companies give specific numbers for breaking even. Yeah, I think it's part of their earnings report.

17:41Jenn Cutter: So they're probably trying to reassure investors like, you know, we're gonna hit the mark. And when we do, don't worry, the earnings are gonna be good, just like we promised. So yeah, it is unusual. A couple of Samsung notes, the One UI 8 beta, which has only been live on the S25 and Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 is now rolling out to devices from 2024, like the S24 and Fold and Flip 6. A stable release is planned for September. Samsung also released the Odyssey OLED G6, the first OLED gaming monitor capable of a 500Hz refresh rate. It's on sale now for$1 ,000, and I would love to get some, but not at that price.

18:23Jenn Cutter: I mean, there are monitors that are more expensive, but that definitely is at the higher end. And how many games will take advantage of the 500 hertz refresh rate at this point, right? That's more to have it and future-proof yourself. But it is tempting. I'm with you. Google continued its practice of leaking its own information ahead of the Made by Google event next Wednesday, August 20th. Google published a video teaser. It seems like it's a commercial for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold that they'll be running after they announce it. They didn't really include any details on it, though. So it's a video of a gray version of the Pro Fold opening, you know, unfolding.

19:01Jenn Cutter: So if you want to see what the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is going to look like, now you can. And then not be surprised when they give you all the details on Wednesday. Amazon announced it will expand its same-day grocery delivery in the U.S. to 2 ,300 cities by the end of the year, which is more than double its footprint now. The service is free for Prime members for orders larger than$25 and costs$12 an order for non-members. This follows positive earnings reports from other food delivery companies like Uber, DoorDash and Instacart, showing that U.S. customers are continuing to have food delivered. Yeah, this is a COVID era thing that a lot of people wondered if it would go away once people got back to being on the road and working in offices more often again.

19:50Jenn Cutter: But it has not in the U.S. I use Instacart. I found that Amazon Prime's delivery service declined and it was not great. So I don't plan to go back to it. Obviously, I already had my city. So this is just adding it to other cities. I'm curious in Canada, though, what the food delivery vibe is for you. If I wanted anything from any gas station or 7-Eleven, I can get that pretty quick. Like, Instacart does exist for groceries and stuff, but Amazon Foods is not really a thing up here. Like, there's a couple of Whole Foods, but in terms of ordering online for delivery, not so much a thing. Do you do any kind of grocery delivery from Instacart or anything else?

20:34When I was sick two years ago, Shoppers was available on an app. So I was like, yes, please send me some cough syrup. That'd be great. Yeah, yeah.

20:43Jenn Cutter: I do Instacart when I'm lazy or when there's really big things that I just don't feel like, you know, wrestling into my car. And it ends up because I pay for the yearly membership. It ends up kind of balancing out on the fees I save for it. But it is a little more expensive because there's always there's always a fee, even when you get the delivery fee reduced. And so you got to be careful because some grocery stores charge extra if the Instacart people are getting it. So there's a lot of news of rich tech people doing things to make each other mad out there. We'll get through it fast. Don't worry.

21:17Jenn Cutter: But the Financial Times says that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is co-founding a brain computer interface or a BCI company called Merge Labs. There's a lot of BCI companies developing solid products. So it's not a bad thing on its own. Companies like Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, Emotive and more are making good advances. The one that always gets more press than I think it probably deserves, although they are also making a decent product, is Elon Musk's Neuralink. And Altman and Musk famously argue over social networks, so Altman getting into this probably has that aspect to it as well. Meanwhile, Musk has still not filed his lawsuit against Apple for alleged mistreatment of XAI's Grok in the App Store.

21:59Jenn Cutter: He said he was going to. We'll see if he does. Apple actually responded, though, which surprised me, telling Bloomberg the App Store is, quote, designed to be fair and free of bias. And finally, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied Musk's request to dismiss a harassment case brought against him by Sam Altman's OpenAI. Doesn't mean OpenAI win the case. It just means the case can now proceed. The judge also dismissed a few of Musk's claims against OpenAI and Microsoft. Despite uncertainty about tariffs, manufacturers' inventories have contracted, according to numbers from the U.S. Institute for Supply Management data.

22:38Analyst company McKinsey says that respondents relying on bigger inventory to cushion disruptions fell to 34 % last year from 60 % in 2022, and the 2025 data looks similar. Just in time, inventory seems to be back. Reuters reports that many companies are using generative models to summarize news, process data, and recommend how much to buy and from whom. These tools also recommend transfers between locations as well as when and where to buy.

23:07Jenn Cutter: Yeah, just-in-time inventory is a very cost-efficient way. It keeps the price of your goods down. It may be one of the reasons you're not seeing bigger inflation. I was surprised to see this, though. and the fact that tools can kind of process through this uncertainty and give you a quicker route to ways to save money by saying, actually, you've got all these products over here, just move them over here and then that'll work out. That makes sense to me because that's the kind of pattern matching that these tools are good at. So I found this to be a really interesting story. Yeah, I have endless respects for logistics people.

23:41I used to work for a now non-existent Canadian retailer just in Canada. And we had a lady and this lady was God tier and she handled everything. She had a big chart in the wall and she just did it all in her head. And man, I would love to know if she would use these tools because if she could find 1 % somewhere, she was gosh darn it going to find it.

24:01Jenn Cutter: Well, and the other thing about these to that point is the story was not, these are replacing anyone. The story was like, this is helping the managers get to the answer faster, but they still have to look at it and go, yeah, that makes sense. Right. So I imagine she would be like, yeah, I'll use these tools, but I'm going to double check. Yeah. And then from my extremely specific point of view, right now we have a pickle problem in Canada, whereas a former Canadian company is sold to the US. But so Bix pickles, which apparently you guys never had. I never knew that. I always thought they were cross border.

24:37So Ontario pickles get shipped down to the States and then the U.S. company that owns it also buys the lids from Canada and then makes pickles and then sends them back. And that's a big problem right now because they're missing from a lot of retailer shelves because of the cross-border uncertainty. And I feel like, hmm, A, I can compensate for a lot, but that is a very shifting political thing that I don't think a straight logistics tool would be able to incorporate as much.

25:03Jenn Cutter: But that's what the story is saying the tools are good for. So maybe the pickle people just need to use the tools. Exactly. All the, like my family is extremely sad about the pickle situation because that is, it's Canada's favorite. Is this why Pamela Anderson is selling pickles? I saw a headline that she was selling pickles and I did not read into it. Great. Now I need to look into that. All right. That's, that's the good news about the generative model tools. Here's a situation where they didn't work as well. A study published by Polish scientists in the Lancet gastroenterology and hepatology journal found that endoscopists, you know, the folks that stick the endoscope up, yeah, who used decision support systems to identify precancerous growths found, and then follow me closely here, the identification rate, the successful identification rate.

25:51Jenn Cutter: So we're not talking about accuracy here. We're just talking about did they find them when they should have dropped below their previous unassisted rate when they stopped using the systems. Okay. So in a study of 1 ,400 non-assisted colonoscopies where they were not using the study, the identification rate was 28.4 % in the three months before they started using an assistant and was 22.4 % in the three months after they stopped using the system. So the implication is they got less good at identifying themselves in the time period where they were using an assistant to diagnose. The system itself did not significantly raise the detection rate when it was in use, because that would be the other argument of like, oh, but did you get a big boost?

26:37Jenn Cutter: They got a very small boost, but not a very significant one. More study is required as this study focused on one assistant system. So maybe the system was not that good and carries a selection bias, of course, because this is based on endoscopists willing to use the system in the first place. They weren't mandated to use it. Yeah. My first reaction was, oh, no, this is terrible. because anytime you hear something with cancer, obviously your brain kind of goes to worst case. And I was trying to think of like, is there any equivalent that I can relate to? And yes, there is. I can't memorize a phone number to save my life anymore because it has been so long since I've had to actually do that.

27:11Now, like I think within the first three months of getting a cell phone, I probably still could have memorized a phone number.

27:17Jenn Cutter: Yeah. Overall, and see, this is what's interesting, especially with the phone number thing, because that is not life-threatening, right? Yes. And it's freeing up your brain resources to do other things that are more important than remembering phone numbers. So arguably, it's a positive that you can't remember the phone number. However, in this case, you saw a mild rise when they were using the system. So maybe you could say, well, using the systems replaces it. But it does point out that you do have to take into account, especially if you're not going to be able to use the system all the time, that it is having an effect on accuracy and do some study and mitigation factors on that.

27:53Jenn Cutter: And maybe you just need a better system, too. Epic Games' easy anti-cheat system is now compatible with Windows 11 on ARM systems that use Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips. This will help companies bring over more games to run natively on Windows 11 on ARM, including Epic's own Fortnite. The easy anti-cheat system now also supports Nintendo Switch, too. Yeah, so this helps make sure that when you're doing multiplayer that people aren't gaming the system, of course, which is good. But it also means you don't have to emulate, right, if you're going to run something on a Copilot Plus machine. Yeah, well, that's why Fortnite on Switch 2 was not great at launch.

28:38And this will all make it better. And nobody likes playing against somebody with wall hacks.

28:43Jenn Cutter: Yeah, no, absolutely. So that is mostly good news. Uh, also mostly good news is that it's August when the news slows down a little bit. So all next week we are doing our fourth annual experiment week. We're swapping out our normal DTNS shows, trying out some new ideas. Uh, we've had some really great stuff in the past shows like behind the data and the tech John were experiment week episodes that became full on podcasts that are going strong. Now, uh, this year we have an exclusive Android faithful reaction to the pixel event, the made by Google event next week. Roger interviewed Adam Sessler of ZDTV tech TV fame.

29:21Jenn Cutter: And Jen, I believe you've got something in the works as well. Do you not? I do. Roger and I are going to talk about some Zen games, just games to relax. So check that out all next week, Monday, August 11th through Friday, August 15th, right here on this very evening.

29:46This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

30:43Jenn Cutter: honey-infused hair oil is a must-have. Also, Sephora makes it super convenient with free shipping and same-day delivery. Shop hair at Sephora and give your hair the upgrade it's been waiting for. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Now, while we still don't know the details of the agreement for NVIDIA and AMD to pay the U.S. government 15 % of revenue from restricted chips sold to Chinese companies. Until we do, we can't really assess the legality. Now, Tom has speculated on ways it could be legal, and several of you have written in with ways it could not. One of the most informed responses we got was from Manny.

31:23Jenn Cutter: Yeah, Manny points out that only Congress has the authority to levy taxes. So this cannot be a new tax, even though I've been calling it a tax. It can't actually be a tax since there's no congressional action on it. So it has to be something like a fee. And Michael wrote, What little has been made public has indicated that the tax or revenue share is a quid pro quo for the export license managed by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security, the BIS. While they have fees for applying for export licenses, they are typically fixed. And NVIDIA should be paying the same price as a competitor exporting the same or similar product to any country.

32:04Jenn Cutter: BIS decisions are based on national security, and the fees are for the time and legal billable hours to decide whether a given export constitutes a national security threat. The idea that BIS might restrict an export on whether a tax is paid is unprecedented. He also added, I think we can all agree that U.S. tech shouldn't be sold to rivals that threaten national security, but do we want a pay-for-play model for companies wanting to export techs? I might be missing an obscure authority or legal argument, but I can't imagine a world in which we tax a company for something we don't believe is a national security threat, but we'll use those authorities to extract revenue from a company.

32:41Jenn Cutter: I hope this was helpful in explaining how unusual this arrangement is and is food for thought about this deal. Yes, thank you for this. I would say, though, based on your own description, that a way it could be defended is that NVIDIA and AMD are both paying the same price as each other. So they are competitors and they are exporting the same type of product to any country. Again, I think that is hard for people to keep in their heads because they're thinking, well, these are only sold to China. But they are allowed to be sold to anybody. Jen and I could buy one if we wanted. It's just that we have better options, so we're not going to buy it.

33:21Jenn Cutter: So the effect is that they're only sold to China because nobody else needs to buy them. And maybe that holds water in a legal argument, but there's not actually a restriction on who sells them. Anybody can make them. It's just that NVIDIA and AMD are the only ones bothering to. And they can be sold to anywhere. So I think that's the defense here. Even if this is some kind of fee, I could see an attack of like, well, this is going beyond just the legal billable hours to decide whether this constitution a national security threat or not. That doesn't seem to match up. yeah it's a lot to think about thank you for submitting these thoughts because we love what you are thinking about do you have some insight into a story much like this one or any other we discussed today please share it with us over at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com a big thanks to manny for contributing to today's show thank you for being along for daily tech news show you can keep us in business uh become a patron if you're not already there's lots of cool stuff over there patreon.com slash dtns talk to you soon

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35:50Thank you.