Important point about the consumer backlash to GPT-5: it was NOT the sycophancy that people missed. This is evident if you read the subreddits. People missed 4o's fun personality - the use of emojis, all caps, slang, and general sense of ~life~. Very different issue from sycophancy, and we shouldn't conflate the two when it comes to understanding how users react to model behavior. The huge majority of people don't WANT a sycophant model. No one trusts an LLM that says you're right all the time, even when you clearly aren't.