Chat switches to a different AI, and gets better.

On August 15th I told the team, flatly, that the chat model stays where it is. On August 21st it moved. I want to explain both, because the reversal is the interesting part.

Why I said no

Every AI answer costs money, and I've set a hard ceiling on how much any one person can cost us per month. When money gets tight, the easy move is to reach for a different model. I didn't want cost pressure to quietly decide which AI you talk to, so I said: fix the cost some other way.

Why I said yes

What changed wasn't pressure. It was a measurement. OpenAI's newest model came out about five to six times cheaper per message than the one we were using, measured on a test account. That brought us inside the cost ceiling for the first time. That alone was reason enough to switch.

Then I used it on my own notes and files, and it was noticeably better at finding the thing I was looking for and at summarizing what it found. That's my impression after using it, not a benchmark, and I'm labeling it that way. But retrieval over your own information is the entire point of Neeos, so a cheaper model that does it better isn't a trade-off. It's good news.

What got worse

It was less personable. The voice felt flatter. I'm treating that as something to fix in how we instruct it, not as a reason to switch back.

The bugs, on the first day

A setting we didn't specify turned out to default to "strict" with this provider. That caused an eighty-seven-second stall on a PDF request, and once saved a note under a made-up ID. We fixed those and added streaming, so words appear as they're written. There's also a switch that sends everyone back to the old model without a new app build, in case I ever need it.

One honest side note: chat answers now go to OpenAI. If you read anything of ours that says otherwise, it was written before this.

Written October 21, 2026 from the build log, and dated to when this happened.