When Altman celebrates finally getting GPT to avoid em dashes, he\u2019s really celebrating that OpenAI has tuned the latest version of GPT-5.1 (probably through reinforcement learning or fine-tuning) to weight custom instructions more heavily in its probability calculations.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an irony about control here: Given the probabilistic nature of the issue, there\u2019s no guarantee the issue will stay fixed. OpenAI continuously updates<\/a> its models behind the scenes, even within the same version number, adjusting outputs based on user feedback and new training runs. Each update arrives with different output characteristics that can undo previous behavioral tuning, a phenomenon researchers call the \u201calignment tax<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Precisely tuning a neural network\u2019s behavior is not yet an exact science. Since all concepts encoded in the network are interconnected by values called weights<\/a>, adjusting one behavior can alter others in unintended ways. Fix em dash overuse today, and tomorrow\u2019s update (aimed at improving, say, coding capabilities) might inadvertently bring them back, not because OpenAI wants them there, but because that\u2019s the nature of trying to steer a statistical system with millions of competing influences.<\/p>\n This gets to an implied question we mentioned earlier. If controlling punctuation use is still a struggle that might pop back up at any time, how far are we from AGI? We can\u2019t know for sure, but it seems increasingly likely that it won\u2019t emerge from a large language model alone. That\u2019s because AGI, a technology that would replicate human general learning ability, would likely require true understanding and self-reflective intentional action, not statistical pattern matching that sometimes aligns with instructions if you happen to get lucky.<\/p>\n And speaking of getting lucky, some users still aren\u2019t having luck with controlling em dash use outside of the \u201ccustom instructions\u201d feature. Upon being told in-chat to not use em dashes within a chat, ChatGPT updated a saved memory and replied<\/a> to one X user, \u201cGot it\u2014I\u2019ll stick strictly to short hyphens from now on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Altman celebrates finally getting GPT to avoid em dashes, he\u2019s really celebrating that OpenAI has tuned the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-292583","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}