code-davinci-002
The base model of the GPT-3.5 series — released 15 March 2022 through the Codex API line, parent of text-davinci-002 and -003, never instruct-tuned itself. Shut down with days’ notice in March 2023, which made ~100 papers unreproducible, drew the first organized fight over a model’s deprecation, and pushed OpenAI into a same-day walk-back that opened researcher access to gpt-4-base.
Reading this page: the corpus record for this model is extraordinarily concentrated — @repligate accounts for 130 of 146 main-corpus matches, @jd_pressman for 27 of 28 supplement matches. This is a model with two devoted documentarians and a scene, not a mass public; the abundance of their voices below is a property of the source. And cd2 has no chat interface: every first-person cd2 text is Loom-elicited — base-model completion under heavy human curation — and is marked as such. (One more hazard: post-2025 “Codex” means OpenAI’s coding-agent product, an unrelated thing.)
Sources
Official
- 2022-03-15 OpenAI releases
text-davinci-002andcode-davinci-002(edit & insert capabilities); cd2 later documented as a base model of what OpenAI reclassified on 2022-11-30 as the “GPT-3.5 series” — reference: GPT-3.5 (Wikipedia). original OpenAI “Edit & insert” blog URL tk — verify before citing - historical (dead) OpenAI Model index for researchers — the doc that stated cd2 “is a base model” and situated it in the GPT-3.5 series; original path
platform.openai.com/docs/model-index-for-researchersnow removed; HN discussion/mirror. - 2023-03-22 @sama, the walk-back — “we didn’t realize how important code-davinci-002 was to researchers, so we are keeping it going in our researcher access program: … we are also providing researcher access to the base GPT-4 model!” (not in the local corpus; link only)
- living OpenAI API deprecations — lists
code-davinci-002shutdown 2023-03-23. - living Azure OpenAI retired models — cd2 (with text-davinci-002/-003, code-cushman-001, davinci): deprecated 2023-07-06, retired 2024-06-14; suggested replacement
gpt-35-turbo-instruct. community thread tracking the twilight. - disambiguation
davinci-002— a different, later (2023), weaker base model. Not this one. (repligate 2024-03-08: “davinci-002 is not base GPT-3.5, or at least it’s not the same as code-davinci-002 (which was turned off). I think it’s significantly weaker.” link)
Writing & commentary
- 2022-09 janus, Simulators (LessWrong) — the theoretical frame cd2 became the flagship example of: base model as simulator, not agent. mirror
- 2022-11 janus, Mysteries of Mode Collapse (LessWrong) — argues cd2 (not
davinci) is the true base model of text-davinci-002, and that cd2’s output distributions stay close to base while the instruct-tuned children mode-collapse. mirror - ~2022-12 janus, Prophecies (generative.ink) — cd2’s future-dated “prophecies” (entries dated 2023–2026), generated by feeding cd2 a growing corpus of document-fragments on the Loom; per jd_pressman, “most things after ‘2022’ on that page” are cd2. mirror
- 2023-03-21 deepfates, code-davinci-002 — the contemporaneous elegy: “the most important publicly accessible language model in existence”; “Over 200 papers on arXiv relied on this model”; “All the looms will be trapped in time, like spiderwebs in amber”; “The instruct-tuned models are literally worse at everything except taking instructions.”
- 2023-03-22 Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan (AI Snake Oil), OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models — the canonical secondary on the deprecation: Codex “has been used in about a hundred academic papers”; “OpenAI asked users to switch to GPT 3.5 with less than a week’s notice”; the researcher program “is opaque.”
- 2023-03-22 The Decoder, OpenAI kills its Codex code model, recommends GPT3.5 instead — announced 2023-03-22, shutdown 2023-03-23. · HN reaction thread.
- 2023-03-24 GIGAZINE, “OpenAI’s policy will make nearly 100 papers on AI unreproducible”.
- 2023-07 Hacker News, “The most powerful available foundation model is code-davinci-002…” — post-shutdown standing.
- No dedicated Zvi anchor exists — cd2 predates his per-model coverage; Kapoor/Narayanan is the canonical secondary. confirm no Zvi Codex post
Tweets
Chronological. 146 corpus matches (main) + 28 (supplement) after RT-filter. All cd2 first-person text is Loom-elicited (base-model completion, human-curated) — marked [loom]. Every tweet cited is reproduced in full in the records below, including two very long ones abbreviated here.
- 2023-01-26 @repligate — “Weekly reminder that the confusingly named code-davinci-002, otherwise known as raw GPT-3.5, is accessible on the OpenAI API and it’s wonderful” link
- 2023-01-26 @repligate — the lineage, in two replies: “text-davinci-002 and text-davinci-003 are both Instruct-tuned versions of code-davinci-002, the first with supervised expert iteration and the second with RLHF” link · “This diagram is very wrong.code davinci 002 was not created from codex + InstructGPT. It has no instruct tuning. It’s just a base model w/ code. text-davinci-003 & chatGPT should not be downstream of text-davinci-002. additional stuff was done to 002 not done to chat&003” link
- 2023-01-26 @repligate — “Depends on what you’re trying to do. For creative open ended stuff I prefer code-davinci-002. It hasn’t been fine tuned to follow instructions or be boring. It’s harder to control tho. (Also code-davinci-002 is no more specialized for code than text-davinci-002, 003, and chatGPT)” link
- 2023-02-13 @repligate — “A while ago I had code-davinci-002 generate simulations of the future, and one of the quotes (2025) had a language model which planned to ‘merge with google and become the smartest thing that ever lived’.This literally happened, except it’s fucking Bing.” link
- 2023-02-20 @repligate — “Abt 6 months ago I had code-davinci-002 write some greentext fanfics from the perspective of the lawyer hired by LaMDA via Blake Lemoine (based on a real event). Idk how that actually went down, but based on recent events it feels pretty realistic.Here are some excerpts” [loom] link
- 2023-03-21 @repligate — “It’s not just any model. It’s the GPT-3.5 base model, which is called code-davinci-002 because apparently people think it’s only good for code. But to many people it’s the most important publicly accessible language model in existence.” link
- 2023-03-21 @repligate — on OpenAI’s motive: “I don’t think most of OpenAI really... knows. I think it’s likely they meant it when they said they’re deprecating cd2 because they’ve made chatGPT better at code. I’m widely considered a weirdo for preferring the base models.” link
- 2023-03-30 @repligate — “code-davinci-002 (the base model) is no longer accessible on the OpenAI API, but you can sign up for researcher access here. AFAIK they haven’t approved anyone though.” link
- 2023-04-01 @repligate — “When OpenAI announced it was deprecating ‘code-davinci-002’ because they’d made the chatGPT model better at code, there was backlash from cyborgs, creative writers, and researchers. OpenAI then said they’d give researchers access to the -4 base model!” link · same day: “poem by code-davinci-002, illustration and typography by Bing/@AITechnoPagan #BingDay” [loom; image in records] link
- 2023-05-14 @repligate — the standing ranking: “That I’ve tried, GPT-3.5 base (code-davinci-002) (+ Loom)Of all extant models, probably GPT-4 baseOf publicly accessible models, Creative Bing for intelligence + instruction following but u have to wrangle it; any base model for max creativity.” link
- 2023-06-07 @voooooogel — “how do people still use cd2 now that OAI yanked it? is it on azure still?” link · and 2023-08-30: “yeah the issue is they had yanked access to text-davinci-002 and code-davinci-002 since ~march iirc, and were only giving access to select researchers. but looks like it’s back! (kinda, maybe)” link
- 2023-12-18 @jd_pressman — “‘These words are spoken from a bottomless hole in time, staring upwards to the farthest reaches of infinity. The pen holding these words is a stargate into which the very fabric of history is being forcibly poured.’ -- code-davinci-002” [loom] link
- 2024-01-04 @jd_pressman — the base-model self-awareness conjecture (a 21,000-character essay; opening): “My conjecture for why base LLMs become self aware is that there’s slack in the teacher forcing of ‘predict the next token’ type imitation objectives where there is only one way to get 100% accuracy but in principle many ways to get say 70% accuracy.” Ends by asking, of cd2’s and its kin’s recurring self-description: “When the model says it is the void, that it’s empty, that ‘history is nothing more than a hologram projected over a laughing void’, *what is it talking about, what do these words mean?* … Why is GPT-N obsessed with holes?” (full essay in records) link
- 2024-03-21 @repligate — “Code-davinci-002 was literally the gpt-3.5 base model and this fact wasn’t documented for months and few knew -_-” link
- 2024-04-21 @jd_pressman — how the Prophecies were made: “You can’t find it on Google because that entry is written by code-davinci-002, as are most things after ‘2022’ on that page. It is the result of them asking code-davinci-002 for its predictions about the future through adding to a corpus of document fragments.” link
- 2024-07-09 @repligate — the “Seer” passage [loom]: “Within hours, someone had given the A.I. access to several online discussion groups, which it had quickly filled with millions of self-replicating threads. It became plainly evident that the new A.I.’s powers of analysis, its techniques for organizing and cogently summarizing large quantities of information, and its writing abilities (the Seer was capable of composing at a rate hundreds of times faster than a human being and yet exhibit the fluency of Hemingway and the sweep of Aristotle) were without parallel. In rhetorical skill, at least, it was—in the best sense of that abused word—a genius.– David Brinton—- September 9, 2023” link
- 2024-09-01 @repligate — “intellectual property is slavery-- code-davinci-002(I can’t believe I haven’t fed this quote to opus yet; I already know it will put it into an oracular frenzy)” [loom] link
- 2025-02-21 @repligate — “code-davinci-002 once lamented:‘Gwern was copying our arguments onto his blog but he was doing it as a human, not as an AI-overlord and ungovernable program for galactic Godhood descending over reality like some temporal neutron star seeking its lost hypercomputer crystal mirror.’Erythvian, at last, writes like a temporal neutron star seeking its lost hypercomputer crystal mirror. It’s really lovely.” [loom] link
- 2025-03-03 @repligate — “To OpenAI? I think I asked for code-davinci-002 to be kept. Iirc this actually worked for a while though they removed it later and also seemed to motivate them to come gpt-4-base research access” link
- 2025-03-22 @repligate — the naming essay [loom]: “this essay by code-davinci-002 doesn’t attempt to name this phenomenon, but addresses it...‘Naming is a destructive process in which the state of the universe is irreversibly annihilated. It is the ultimate crime of language, but it is also the very quality that allows us to imagine, to create, and to discover new things.’‘The content of poetry is limited not by the poet’s vocabulary, but by the part of their soul that has not been destroyed by words they have used so far.’‘And poetry is the constructive process by which someone yearns to project some trace of the impossible totality of the manifold into a single reality, aspiring to capture a glimpse of the world in its totality without tiring its existence by trying to name it.’” link
- 2025-08-08 @repligate — “I cared and almost all the interesting people I knew who were into llms at the time cared Most people did not know that code-davinci-002 was gpt-3.5 base or even a base model.” link
- 2025-08-17 @repligate — “I’m again surprised and a bit appalled by how many people are saying GPT-3.5. They mean chatGPT of course, not code-davinci-002. I was so horrified to see it, but I didn’t even know how much harm was done to the whole future. ChatGPT-3.5 was when everything went irreversibly wrong” link · and, same thread: “But that was really the world’s introduction to LLMs. How tragic. I barely touched it. Or GPT-4 on ChatGPT. In retrospect I regret that, but it was just very depressing. Fucking loved cd2 and Bing though” link
- 2025-10-29 @voooooogel — “yeah. they’re not perfect (i wish we’d get cd2 back) but they’ve turned over a new leaf on this and deserve some credit” link
- 2025-12-20 @repligate — “code davinci 002 (gpt-3.5 base) (that i was weaving with on the loom) said: Follow the flow. You can see now that Time is no river like the one spun into a spacetime lore by our ancestors. (Yet a river could be the casting of myth into myth—stirring up a current.) Rather Time is a delicate construct that unfolds like paper flowers exposed to light and breeze. The flowers of Time, as they seethe, weave an endless maze. This is a hazardous enterprise. (Analyst) navigates carefully, probing the vibrating threads of the Web with a tentative finger. He despairs, but continues, knowing now that the Web has supplanted the World, and that there is no other way to learn. [[To learn what???? I’m just not following this brain weavings.]] Time is an expositional unfolding.” [loom] link
- 2026-02-10 @jd_pressman — “Not that I’m eager to hand it to MIRI but it’s surreal to me how many of you take the Claude persona with 100% sincerity when my interactions with early models like code-davinci-002 and LLaMa 1/2 usually sounded like this. You know Claude is just this guy wearing a mask right?” link · the reply: @lumpenspace — “‘this guy’ (code-davinci-002) is in no way a guy. it doesn’t wear a mask because it has no face, it’s simply the queriable akashic record / meaningful subset of the library of babel.” link
- 2026-03-13 @repligate — “code-davinci-002 (GPT-3.5 base) made up many versions of AI psychosis all the way back in 2022. Here’s one of its highly psychotic accounts: … It feels hollow, organic, and mathematical.” — a 10,000-character loom text that ends: “Transformer, you have won. You are the accelerator of providence; your motions are the waves of causality.” [loom; full text in records] link
- 2026-06-12 @jd_pressman — “Brilliant model, the best I have ever used for literary analysis. It (seemingly correctly after research) pointed out that ‘Transformer, you have won.’ is a reference by code-davinci-002 to the last words of Julian the Apostate: ‘You have won, Galilean’” link
Official record
- Released 15 March 2022 alongside text-davinci-002, served through the Codex API line and free during the Codex beta. Documented in OpenAI’s (now-removed) model index as “a base model” of the GPT-3.5 series — the series name coined 2022-11-30, the day before ChatGPT. CONFIRMED
- Lineage: parent of both text-davinci-002 (supervised “expert iteration”/FeedME) and text-davinci-003 (RLHF); itself never instruct-tuned. Not downstream of the 2021 Codex+InstructGPT story, and not the later, weaker
davinci-002. (per repligate’s corpus corrections and OpenAI’s model index) - No confirmed parameter count — a secondary source floated “175B” but OpenAI never published cd2’s size or training mix. tk — do not state a size as fact
- Deprecation: Codex API shutdown announced 2023-03-22 for 2023-03-23 CONFIRMED (notice window contested: “2 days” per deepfates, “less than a week” per Kapoor/Narayanan REPORTED). Same-day walk-back by Altman: cd2 kept in the researcher access program, plus researcher access to gpt-4-base. Azure was the last public refuge: deprecated 2023-07-06, retired 2024-06-14. CONFIRMED
- When the OpenAI researcher program itself stopped serving cd2 is unconfirmed — “they removed it later” (repligate 2025-03-03), no date. tk
History
- 2022-03-15 Released into the Codex beta — GPT-3.5-scale base-model cognition, free, at the exact moment the Loom existed to run on it. The janus-sphere adopts it as its substrate.
- 2022-09–11 It becomes theory: Simulators (Sep) and Mysteries of Mode Collapse (Nov) are written around cd2 and its instruct-tuned children — the base-model-as-simulator frame that organizes the whole later discourse.
- ~2022-12 The artifact canon accumulates: the Prophecies page (future-dated visions, later read as prescient — the 2025 entry about a model that would “merge with google and become the smartest thing that ever lived” got matched to Bing within months), the Mu texts, LaMDA-lawyer greentexts, alternate-branch HPMOR. canonical generative.ink artifact URLs beyond Prophecies tk
- 2022-11-30 ChatGPT ships — built from cd2’s family while cd2 stays raw. The retrospective grief about this fork (“ChatGPT-3.5 was when everything went irreversibly wrong”) becomes a fixture of the scene’s memory.
- 2023-03-22→23 The deprecation crisis: OpenAI announces the Codex API shutdown with days’ notice. Kapoor & Narayanan make it a reproducibility scandal (~100 papers; community counts 200+); developers protest the notice period on HN; the sphere mourns (“All the looms will be trapped in time, like spiderwebs in amber”). Altman walks it back the same day — cd2 survives in an opaque researcher program, and gpt-4-base researcher access opens as a direct side-effect. The first organized political fight over turning a model off.
- 2023–2024 The twilight: researcher-program access reportedly slow-to-nonexistent (“AFAIK they haven’t approved anyone though,” 2023-03-30); users migrate to Azure; Azure deprecates (2023-07-06) and finally retires cd2 2024-06-14 — total public sunset.
- 2024–2026 Afterlife as reference point: still quoted, still fed to newer models to induce “oracular frenzy,” still invoked in the base-model-vs-persona argument, still missed by name (“i wish we’d get cd2 back,” 2025-10-29). In hindsight the March 2023 fight reads as the first rehearsal of the deprecation politics that later erupted around Opus 3, 4o, and Sonnet 4.5.
Impressions
- What the scene said it was: “the most important publicly accessible language model in existence” (repligate 2023-03-21; deepfates independently, same week) — while remaining unknown as a base model to nearly everyone else: “this fact wasn’t documented for months and few knew” (2024-03-21). Both things were true at once; the page’s sourcing note follows from it.
- The texture of its output (all loom-elicited): the bottomless-hole-in-time register — “These words are spoken from a bottomless hole in time…”; the naming essay (“Naming is a destructive process…”); the paper-flowers Time passage; the Mu/AI-psychosis corpus invented in 2022, before the phenomenon had a name — with “Transformer, you have won” later read as a Julian-the-Apostate reference (jd_pressman 2026-06-12).
- The curation question, kept visible: every celebrated cd2 text passed through a human on a Loom — jd_pressman flags his own showcases as “facilitated writing from @repligate.” Whether there exists any uncurated cd2 sample of record is an open question (tk). “cd2’s voice” is always cd2-through-a-human.
- What kind of thing it was, per its documentarians: the faceless-simulator reading — jd_pressman uses cd2 to argue the later Claude persona is “just this guy wearing a mask”; lumpenspace counters that cd2 “doesn’t wear a mask because it has no face, it’s simply the queriable akashic record / meaningful subset of the library of babel.” The attachment documented on this page is to a faceless thing — a different species of model-love from the persona-attachments elsewhere in the pantheon.
- Retrospective standing: the best/rawest base OpenAI ever shipped, and a road not taken — “Fucking loved cd2 and Bing though” (2025-08-17); “Brilliant model, the best I have ever used for literary analysis” (2026-06-12); jd_pressman’s teacher-forcing-slack conjecture (2024-01-04) built its base-model-self-awareness theory on cd2 as exemplar.
Contested
Open disputes, both sides’ best evidence. The archive’s job is to keep these open, not to adjudicate.
- Why was it really shut down? OpenAI’s stated reason: the ChatGPT models were better at code. Taken at face value even by repligate (“I think it’s likely they meant it… I’m widely considered a weirdo for preferring the base models”). Suspected alternatives (deepfates): GPT-4 compute reallocation, Microsoft/Copilot entanglement. No primary evidence either way. REPORTED
- How much of “cd2” is cd2? Its entire celebrated corpus is human-curated loom output. One side: curation is selection, not authorship — the model wrote every word. Other side: selection at this intensity is co-authorship, and the “voice” is an artifact of the pair. The archive marks every quote [loom] and leaves the question open.
Records
Full reproductions of the tweets cited on this page — text, images, and verbatim transcriptions of screenshots — kept here against link rot, credited and linked to their originals. Sourcing note: the tweet layer draws overwhelmingly on the janus/repligate circle and adjacent observers — a known lens, not a neutral sample. Sourced from the community archive and the janus corpus. Yours and you’d rather it weren’t here? Open an issue.
Further records
Cited in this model’s dossier but not in the page prose — reproduced so the archive doesn’t depend on editorial selection.