OpenAI’s launch of its long-awaited GPT-5 AI model turned out to be a bit of a dud.

Those expecting a revolutionary change, something CEO Sam Altman promised outright months ago, were left sorely disappointed. In many ways, GPT-5 felt more like an iterative improvement, while a colder and less personable tone took aback those looking to foster an emotional relationship with the bot.

Power users on social media voiced their discontent in droves, accusing OpenAI of cutting corners by hamstringing GPT-5’s output, even calling it a “disaster.” The company responded by bowing to widespread demands for a “warmer”-sounding model.

During a chat with reporters last week, Altman admitted that the company “totally screwed up some things on the rollout.”

But even while the stumbling rollout was still unfolding, one of the industry’s most notorious hypemen was already promising huge things for GPT-5’s successor. As CNBC reports, OpenAI is looking to turn a new leaf, with Altman already discussing how GPT-6 — which doesn’t have any form of release date just yet — will usher in a revolution once again.

According to the executive, who has long garnered a reputation for making grandiose and exaggerated statements about his company’s tech, the next iteration will have a much better ability to remember its users’ preferences and habits.

“People want memory,” he said during last week’s chat with reporters. “People want product features that require us to be able to understand them.”

Altman also said that OpenAI’s chatbot should be capable of reflecting back the worldview that its users want.

“I think our product should have a fairly center-of-the-road, middle stance, and then you should be able to push it pretty far,” he said. “If you’re like, ‘I want you to be super woke’ — it should be super woke.”

That’s despite him previously acknowledging a worrying trend of sycophantic AIs fueling delusional spirals and full-blown breaks from reality days earlier.

“People have used technology, including AI, in self-destructive ways; if a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that,” the CEO tweeted. “Most users can keep a clear line between reality and fiction or role-play, but a small percentage cannot.”

During last week’s chat, the CEO also said that AI will give “better” medical and legal advice than human doctors and lawyers — though whether it’s actually headed that way remains dubious at best.

Given how last week’s GPT-5 launch went, it’s not hard to see Altman’s comments as an attempt to redirect the narrative back toward the future. Critics have long warned that we may rapidly be approaching a plateau in which AI stops getting all that much better.

GPT-5 appears to have confirmed their suspicions, at least to some degree, with Altman being forced to jump in and hype up the next iteration days after his company’s latest AI launch.

“I don’t hear a lot of companies using AI saying that 2025 models are a lot more useful to them than 2024 models, even though the 2025 models perform better on benchmarks,” longtime AI critic Gary Marcus told the New Yorker.

That kind of concern seemingly hasn’t flown over the head of Altman, either.

“The models have already saturated the chat use case,” he told reporters last week.

Instead, Altman is promising a future where people simply think their ChatGPT prompts in their head, calling “neural interfaces” a “cool idea.” Indeed, last week, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI and Altman are starting a brain-computer interface company to rival their arch nemesis Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

As far as the privacy implications are concerned, OpenAI doesn’t appear to be too worried, with Altman telling reporters that data encryption “very well could be” added to future AI models — though he stopped short of revealing any concrete plans to actually do it.

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The post After Disastrous GPT-5, Sam Altman Pivots to Hyping Up GPT-6 appeared first on Futurism.

Origianl Creator:Victor Tangermann
Original Link: https://futurism.com/disastrous-gpt-5-sam-altman-hyping-up-gpt-6
Originally Posted: Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:09:27 +0000