The trouble with GPT-5…
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been talking GPT-5 up as a quantum leap in intelligence for so long, that it was almost inevitable its release would be something of a disappointment.
While it’s not quite New Coke level bad, it’s not the reception they’d hoped for.
Social media was immediately flooded with GPT-5 (apparently) giving very stupid answers, including obvious logic flaws, stating that 9.11 is greater than 9.9 and following patterns to the incorrect conclusions.
OpenAI’s odds on Polymarket for having the “best model by end of August” plunged from 75% to just 8% in the aftermath, though it’s climbed back to 24% since.
The New Yorker wrote GPT-5 “is the latest product to suggest that progress on large language models has stalled” and that it had reopened the debate on whether you can scale up LLMs past a certain point.
“Nobody with intellectual integrity can still believe that pure scaling will get us to AGI,” wrote AI skeptic Gary Marcus.
OpenAI also clearly underestimated the personal affection many users have for GPT-4o — as sycophantic and gratingly insincere as it seemed to others.
The upgrade includes a router that dynamically switches between various models with different capabilities (GPT-5, GPT-5 mini, GPT-5 nano, thinking mode, etc). It switches to the dumb models to save costs on answering dumb questions, and flips to the more costly advanced models for the hard stuff.
This wasn’t working properly when it was released, which may explain some of the poor reception and pretty substandard IQ test results.
Altman announced an update mid-week, allowing users to choose between auto, fast and thinking models. GPT-4o is also back for paid users and he promised to give users plenty of notice before it’s retired again.
“We are working on an update to GPT-5’s personality which should feel warmer than the current personality but not as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that social media is a complete shitshow that has ruined entire generations.
The personality traits most linked to success in life, such as conscientiousness, agreeableness and extroversion, have plummeted among the under 50s, while neuroticism has skyrocketed.
Only Boomers have been spared, possibly thanks to their affinity for heartwarming AI slop.
Various solutions have been proposed, including changing the AI based content algorithms to provide less divisive content or switching back to a chronological feed (a la Bluesky).
But a new preprint from Cornell University argues that outrage, negativity and conflict may well be structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media.
University of Amsterdam researchers used AI personas to simulate online social media behavior and the experiment suggested that all of the solutions had drawbacks.
Chronological ordering of feeds reduced attention inequality (where the voices of a small number of elite users are amplified) but instead exposed users to more extreme content.
“Bridging algorithms” that surface less divisive content and a greater range of views helped reduce partisanship and increased viewpoint diversity but increased attention inequality. Boosting viewpoint diversity, meanwhile, had no significant impact at all.
The AI algo also hates your friends
Meta has argued in court that the Federal Trade Commission can’t prove it has a monopoly on the personal social networking market — because Facebook and Instagram’s AI powered algorithm rarely show you content from your friends anymore.
On Instagram, just 7% of time is spent looking at content from friends, while on Facebook, it’s 17%.
Meta said the rise of TikTok had forced it to develop the new AI-powered algorithm.
Robots can fold towels now
Figure’s Helix robot has become the first humanoid robot able to fold towels. This may not sound very impressive, as any idiot human can fold a towel, but to a robot, this has been an insurmountable problem called “deformable object manipulation.” It’s tricky because the object keeps changing shape, which breaks the system’s internal models.
For the first time, a humanoid robot can fold laundry using a neural net
We made no changes to the Helix architecture, only new datapic.twitter.com/lSHX4Uc1qA
— Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) August 12, 2025
ChatGPT dietary advice sends man insane
A man who asked ChatGPT for advice on how to cut salt out of his diet, poisoned himself with its recommendation and ended up in a mental hospital.
Asked for a salt replacement, ChatGPT suggested sodium bromide, which is suitable for replacing salt in cleaning products, but definitely not for humans to ingest.
He ended up…
cointelegraph.com