ChatGPT Just Shocked Me—This Feels Like a Whole New AI

I'm a heavy Claude AI (pro) user—proofreading and stuff. I used to find it funny that people used ChatGPT for personal growth, therapy, etc. Because the last I tried ChatGPT was perhaps 8 months back. After months of trying, I was thoroughly bored of how bland it felt, how censored, how politically correct, afraid of speaking things that real humans would talk about in forums. Always filled with disclaimers and how you should accept, tolerate, blah blah.

For whatever reason, three days back, I used the free version of ChatGPT, and I was BLOWN AWAY by how brutal and honest it felt. I immediately turned 'memory' back on, which I had kept OFF before for privacy reasons. I realized, ChatGPT was now willing to speak things I thought was impossible for mainstream AI to say just a few months back. On further search I saw that this was a concious effort by OpenAI to catch up with competition.

I actualy purchased Plus just to see what Deep Research could do. I used it to give me some data on stocks I should buy (I'm a long term investor but don't have time to really dig into every business article out there). After a 6 minute research (it's fun watching the live thought it shows you on the side of the chat), ChatGPT gave me some interesting stocks I personally would have never zeroed down on. When I shared the names with my professional day-trader friends, they said, 'Yea, good stock!' I got back to asking it about life, the kind of people/women I should deal with, what they want, what I should be, and every reply was so ... unfiltered. It truly felt like I am speaking with a wise person who has opinions. This is what I want. Not some whitewashed reply that doesn't take a stand after careful objective reasoning.

This also truly feel scary to me now. This is not even AGI, but just removing so much of the guardrails off AI, I see a strong glimpse of how powerful as well as useful it might get! Keep it up, OpenAI!

Edit: Correct me if I am wrong, but for just conversing and discussing life, model GPT-4o is what I've found best. The o1 and o3 doesn't update 'memory'. Chatting with 4o is what also updates memory. Correct me if I am wrong.

Edit 2: Since the top comment said my post was written by Ai, I deleted the minor proofreading ChatGPT did on it and update with the original text I hand-typed. Zero AI.