When Altman celebrates lastly getting GPT to keep away from em dashes, he’s actually celebrating that OpenAI has tuned the newest model of GPT-5.1 (most likely by way of reinforcement studying or fine-tuning) to weight customized directions extra closely in its likelihood 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 constantly updates its fashions behind the scenes, even throughout the identical model quantity, adjusting outputs primarily based on person suggestions and new coaching runs. Every replace arrives with completely different output traits that may undo earlier behavioral tuning, a phenomenon researchers name the “alignment tax.”
Exactly tuning a neural community’s conduct isn’t but a precise science. Since all ideas encoded within the community are interconnected by values known as weights, adjusting one conduct can alter others in unintended methods. Repair em sprint overuse in the present day, and tomorrow’s replace (aimed toward bettering, say, coding capabilities) would possibly inadvertently convey them again, not as a result of OpenAI desires 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 remains to be a wrestle which may pop again up at any time, how far are we from AGI? We will’t know for certain, nevertheless it appears more and more doubtless that it received’t emerge from a big language mannequin alone. That’s as a result of AGI, a expertise that might replicate human normal studying means, would doubtless require true understanding and self-reflective intentional motion, not statistical sample matching that generally aligns with directions when 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 advised in-chat to not use em dashes inside a chat, ChatGPT up to date a saved reminiscence and replied to 1 X person, “Received it—I’ll stick strictly to quick hyphens any longer.”
