o3-mini does not support vision capabilities, so developers should continue using OpenAI o1 for visual reasoning tasks.
ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users can access OpenAI o3-mini starting today, with Enterprise access coming in February. o3-mini will replace OpenAI o1-mini in the model picker, offering higher rate limits and lower latency, making it a compelling choice for coding, STEM, and logical problem-solving tasks.
As part of this upgrade, we’re tripling the rate limit for Plus and Team users from 50 messages per day with o1-mini to 150 messages per day with o3-mini.
Starting today, free plan users can also try OpenAI o3-mini by selecting ‘Reason’ in the message composer or by regenerating a response. This marks the first time a reasoning model has been made available to free users in ChatGPT.
Benchmarks don’t capture real-world complexity like latency, domain-specific tasks, or edge cases. Enterprises often need more than raw performance, also needing reliability, ease of integration, and robust vendor support. Enterprise money will support the industries providing these services.
… it is also reasonable to assume that anything you put into the app or their website will be going to the Chinese government as well, so factor that in as well.
In software development, “technical debt” is a term used to describe the accumulation of shortcuts, suboptimal solutions, and outdated code that occur as developers rush to meet deadlines or prioritize immediate goals over long-term maintainability. While this concept initially seems abstract, its consequences are concrete and can significantly affect the security, usability, and stability of software systems.
The Nature of Technical Debt
Technical debt arises when software engineers choose a less-than-ideal implementation in the interest of saving time or reducing upfront effort. Much like financial debt, these decisions come with an interest rate: over time, the cost of maintaining and updating the system increases, and more effort is required to fix problems that stem from earlier choices. In extreme cases, technical debt can slow development to a crawl, causing future updates or improvements to become far more difficult than they would have been with cleaner, more scalable code.
Impact on Security
One of the most significant threats posed by technical debt is the vulnerability it creates in terms of software security. Outdated code often lacks the latest security patches or is built on legacy systems that are no longer supported. Attackers can exploit these weaknesses, leading to data breaches, ransomware, or other forms of cybercrime. Furthermore, as systems grow more complex and the debt compounds, identifying and fixing vulnerabilities becomes increasingly challenging. Failing to address technical debt leaves an organization exposed to security risks that may only become apparent after a costly incident.
Impact on Usability
Technical debt also affects the user experience. Systems burdened by outdated code often become clunky and slow, leading to poor usability. Engineers may find themselves continuously patching minor issues rather than implementing larger, user-centric improvements. Over time, this results in a product that feels antiquated, is difficult to use, or lacks modern functionality. In a competitive market, poor usability can alienate users, causing a loss of confidence and driving them to alternative products or services.
Impact on Stability
Stability is another critical area impacted by technical debt. As developers add features or make updates to systems weighed down by previous quick fixes, they run the risk of introducing bugs or causing system crashes. The tangled, fragile nature of code laden with technical debt makes troubleshooting difficult and increases the likelihood of cascading failures. Over time, instability in the software can erode both the trust of users and the efficiency of the development team, as more resources are dedicated to resolving recurring issues rather than innovating or expanding the system’s capabilities.
The Long-Term Costs of Ignoring Technical Debt
While technical debt can provide short-term gains by speeding up initial development, the long-term costs are much higher. Unaddressed technical debt can lead to project delays, escalating maintenance costs, and an ever-widening gap between current code and modern best practices. The more technical debt accumulates, the harder and more expensive it becomes to address. For many companies, failing to pay down this debt eventually results in a critical juncture: either invest heavily in refactoring the codebase or face an expensive overhaul to rebuild from the ground up.
Conclusion
Technical debt is an unavoidable aspect of software development, but understanding its perils is essential for minimizing its impact on security, usability, and stability. By actively managing technical debt—whether through regular refactoring, code audits, or simply prioritizing long-term quality over short-term expedience—organizations can avoid the most dangerous consequences and ensure their software remains robust and reliable in an ever-changing technological landscape.
“Simon Willison created a Datasette browser to explore WebVid-10M, one of the two datasets used to train the video generation model, and quickly learned that all 10.7 million video clips were scraped from Shutterstock, watermarks and all.”
“In addition to the Shutterstock clips, Meta also used 10 million video clips from this 100M video dataset from Microsoft Research Asia. It’s not mentioned on their GitHub, but if you dig into the paper, you learn that every clip came from over 3 million YouTube videos.”
“It’s become standard practice for technology companies working with AI to commercially use datasets and models collected and trained by non-commercial research entities like universities or non-profits.”
“Like with the artists, photographers, and other creators found in the 2.3 billion images that trained Stable Diffusion, I can’t help but wonder how the creators of those 3 million YouTube videos feel about Meta using their work to train their new model.”
