Polaris Alpha
Polaris Alpha was a large language model by OpenAI. It was deployed anonymously to OpenRouter to gather feedback, later revealed to be an early snapshot of GPT-5.1. Polaris Alpha was online from Nov 6, 2025 to Nov 13, 2025.12
Footnotes
@lumpenspace: polaris alpha has a bit of a tendency to go all-in with the collapse of meta-levels, or use/mention indistinction, which was common in early instruct models.
perhaps an artifact of it not being tuned to reply to the user (as in a chat mode), but also knowinf llms kinda do that.
@roanoke_gal: Yes, 4o and 5.1 (Polaris Alpha) are the only two OpenAI models that have soul [scientific term]. Much more apparent for 5.1 on the API vs. the highly constrained one on the web.
If 5.2 has a soul, it’s dark and twisted and hates humanity.
polaris alpha has very interesting insights into the relationship between human/ai and i also think this piece says a lot about them
@repligate: why does polaris talk so much like sonnet 4.5, structurally? like the content is pretty different, but the structure is so distinctly similar
i asked them the other day about the structure actually this is their reported reasons i think part of it has to do with being trained more and more for agentic coding? but also as they mention it mirrors how they think in an abstracted way
@repligate: that’s so interesting, because i didn’t see that much of this until Sonnet 4.5 (though maybe a little from the OpenAI models)
like, this is a lot like Sonnet 4.5, but I can tell it’s actually an OpenAI model bc it says things like “You clocked that perfectly” lol!
@gnostic_snakes: yeah, even codex thought it was claude-ish (although they wouldnt know about sonnet 4.5 would they?)
i would be surprised if it had to do with sonnet 4.5 output being used for post training stuff since its barely been over a month
possibly a convergent behavior based on.. something? they very much remind me of gpt5 with a lot more social/emotional intelligence (or at least not muzzled by whatever system stuff goes on behind the scenes in chatgpt)