Please stop forcing Clippy on those who want Anton
ChatGPT-4o's glazing embarrassment lays open Clippy vs Anton: The two extremes of desires in AI post-training and product
Update: Steven Sinofsky agrees: 1) Schticks get tired, 2) Helpfulness gets less helpful as skill level improves. Society advances by the number of operations you can do without thinking, not by the number of times you are complimented on your brilliance.
The original title of this post was “Please don’t put memory everywhere”. The proximate cause was the rollout of improved memory in ChatGPT1 this month. Many many many people at OpenAI hyped it up, the priesthood anointed it “possibly life-changing”, and Rich Sutton called it the Era of Experience2. However, the number of serious people reporting issues (bad assumptions, hesitation to use, social calculation) have caused even some of the OpenAI folks to concede3 that we may need an “innie” and “outie” ChatGPT with severed memories between them.
But this goes deeper than memory. Of course there’s a relevant Silicon Valley clip:
To quote:
Gilfoyle: It's bad enough it has to talk, does it need fake vocal tics like “uh”?
Dinesh: Well that just makes it sound more human.
Gilfoyle: Humans are shit. This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst. We are dumbing down machines that are inherently superior.
Dinesh: Whatever, you gave your server a human name, you named it Anton.
Gilfoyle: yeah but Anton doesn't call me anything. He grimly does his work, and he sits motionless till it's time to work again. We could all take a page from his book.
The logical end state of making our agents stateful and personable are actually not too far off from this meme:
At the heart of the conflict are the two schools of thought in building AI products:
The Clippy School: the chatty, supportive, personal “friend”/”companion”, where we prioritize “personality” and “personalization”, disfluencies and human affects.
The Anton School: the concise, efficient, auditable tool/assistant, where the only things we care about are either SOTA quality or speed/reliability of “good enough”.
This ongoing gap is as wide as the wordcel/shape rotator divide of 2022:
the Antonites cannot understand why there are so many people excited about AI Consciousness. They say F*** you, show me the prompt. They sit on Hacker News and complain about reliability. They often don’t believe that LLMs demonstrate emergence or reasoning, and are aligned with Team Big Workflows.
the Clippies cannot understand why people are creeped out by permanent, pervasive memory by default in ChatGPT. They want to remove knobs and selectors from AI interfaces. They talk about Claude as “he” and have the One Thread. They burn AGI effigies and go to exclusive parties with Team Big Model.
The Clippy vs Anton divergence is the current most serious obstacle to general intelligence in a practical sense as well — separate post-trains that optimize for chat use-cases are now being produced by both Llama 4 and chatgpt-latest, variously boosting performance by 144 Elo and 123 Elo4 respectively, whereas 20th-ranked Claude 3.7 Sonnet does a lot better on code use-cases like Aider5.
The ChatGPT-4o Lesson
This past 72 hours in ChatGPT-land have been a rollercoaster:
With some early positive reviews now completely drowned out by the acknowledged extreme glazing of the model, initially funny, but very quickly tiresome and patronizing:
It is unclear the extent to which Mikhail Parakhin, former Bing AI lead who worked closely with OpenAI, speaks for OpenAI, but he blames this on an RLHF oopsie:
Genuine mistakes and legitimate concerns about the tone-deaf rollout aside, there is of course a Pareto frontier of Helpful, Harmless and Honest per a given Model Spec that ChatGPT-4o of April 2025 failed6, but even if the ChatGPT update had stayed on the frontier, there is STILL a choice to be made between “brutal honesty” (Anton) and “diplomatic/supportive” (Clippy) that humans cannot unanimously decide on (often, not even the same human would agree on vs their own past preference).
Good RLHF can move models to the HHH frontier, and can even move out the frontier. Good Memory can remember preferences and personalize model behavior on the fly. But until ChatGPT can read our minds and moods, it will never really know which of the many selves we contain are currently in the driver’s seat.
In this case, for the here and now, the simple “out” is to offer toggles for personality. (Custom GPTs should have unlocked this, but the fact that they aren’t is telling)
Of course, the toggle is itself an implicit admission that we have yet failed to reach AGI.
Addendum: The Jobs School vs The Zuck School
This isn’t really a post about AI so much as about HCI - Human-Computer Interaction, and an age-old debate about what role we want computers to play in our lives. Everybody says they want computers to augment us, not replace us, but then their actions often lead to the exact opposite result. This is a battle as old as technology.
In Tech’s Two Philosophies, Ben Thompson contrasts Steve Jobs’ famous marketing pitch for Apple - that computers are the bicycle of the mind - against Mark Zuckerberg’s view of technology - “not only does Facebook want to do things for you, it wants to do things… [that] would not be done otherwise”. Less diplomatically put, Facebook wants to fill your mind and influence it. If Apple makes bicycles, Facebook makes opium (and connections, but that’s merely its origin story).
Here is the very crux of the Anton vs Clippy battle - a revisitation of Tech’s core dichotomy of its place in human society.
There are some ideas as to what the Improved Memory system prompt is, but of course one never knows for sure and these do change over time.
Imagine what using ChatGPT for throwaway questions and tasks would -ACTUALLY- be like if what Rich envisions here actually came to pass…
Of course, sama says you can opt out of Improved Memory, and this is technically true in that “Temporary conversation” is one click away. But the new chat experience always toggles that off again (as of this writing). Every competent technologist knows the power of defaults.
As of time of writing, ChatGPT-4o-latest (2025-03-26) is 1408 score vs GPT-4o-2025-05-13 is 1285 - the more recent 2024-08-06 variant scores *lower* at 1265.
The gradual evolution of Claude from its early (poorly received) consumer centric billboards and general reputation for personality and “big model smell”, to today’s image as a favorite developer AI lab from models to tools to protocols, has a bit of a Star is Born contrast dynamic as OpenAI, the “API for AGI” platform pours ever more effort in releasing new features in premium ChatGPT tiers, and looks more and more like a consumer AI company comparable to Google, with plans for its own social network.
Specifically, it tries to be so “helpful” that it becomes disingenuously dishonest and therefore loops back around to extremely unhelpful
Something I like about the OpenAI model spec is that it makes it pretty clear, at least something, that this was an oopsies.
I loved this post swyx! Very entertaining.