When Altman celebrates lastly getting GPT to keep away from em dashes, he’s actually celebrating that OpenAI has tuned the most recent model of GPT-5.1 (most likely via reinforcement studying or fine-tuning) to weight customized directions extra closely in its chance calculations.
There’s an irony about management right here: Given the probabilistic nature of the difficulty, there’s no assure the difficulty will keep fastened. OpenAI continuously updates its fashions behind the scenes, even inside the similar model quantity, adjusting outputs based mostly on consumer suggestions and new coaching runs. Every replace arrives with totally different output traits that may undo earlier behavioral tuning, a phenomenon researchers name the “alignment tax.”
Exactly tuning a neural community’s habits will not be but a precise science. Since all ideas encoded within the community are interconnected by values called weights, adjusting one habits can alter others in unintended methods. Repair em sprint overuse at this time, and tomorrow’s replace (aimed toward enhancing, say, coding capabilities) would possibly inadvertently carry them again, not as a result of OpenAI needs them there, however as a result of that’s the character of making an attempt to steer a statistical system with hundreds of thousands of competing influences.
This will get to an implied query we talked about earlier. If controlling punctuation use continues to be a wrestle which may pop again up at any time, how far are we from AGI? We will’t know for positive, but it surely appears more and more possible that it received’t emerge from a big language mannequin alone. That’s as a result of AGI, a know-how that may replicate human normal studying skill, would possible require true understanding and self-reflective intentional motion, not statistical sample matching that typically aligns with directions should you occur to get fortunate.
And talking of getting fortunate, some customers nonetheless aren’t having luck with controlling em sprint use exterior of the “customized directions” characteristic. Upon being informed in-chat to not use em dashes inside a chat, ChatGPT up to date a saved reminiscence and replied to at least one X consumer, “Obtained it—I’ll stick strictly to quick hyphens any longer.”
