- OpenAI’s Sam Altman says the company ‘screwed up’ with ChatGPT 5.2
- The focus was on technical capability, not user interactions.
- Altman said OpenAI focuses on some features and should “neglect” others
ChatGPT users are not shy about voicing their concerns when they feel that an update has broken the OpenAI chatbot, as was ably demonstrated when ChatGPT 5.2 made its debut. This update was met with howls of displeasure, and now OpenAI has admitted that it “screwed up” by implementing the change.
The comments came from OpenAI boss Sam Altman, who spoke at a developer meeting earlier this week. At the event, Altman was asked about negative user feedback about ChatGPT 5.2 and stated that this version of the artificial intelligence (AI) tool had produced content that was “unwieldy” and “difficult to read.”
In response, Altman was blunt: “I think we just blew it,” he said, before continuing: “We expect future versions of GPT 5.x to be much better at writing than 4.5.”
Interestingly, Altman blamed OpenAI’s decision to focus on the technical aspects of ChatGPT 5.2 rather than its writing capabilities: “We decided, and I think rightly so, to put most of our effort into 5.2 to make it super good at intelligence, reasoning, coding, engineering, that kind of stuff,” he said. “And here we have limited bandwidth and sometimes we focus on one thing and neglect another.”
making sacrifices
Altman’s explanation is illuminating because it sheds light on OpenAI’s decision-making practices. It suggests that there will always be elements of ChatGPT that will have to be sacrificed when trying to improve others. In the case of ChatGPT 5.2, this was perhaps more noticeable than in previous updates because it concerned the way the chatbot spoke to you and worked with your prompts.
We can see this different emphasis in the ChatGPT 4.5 update, for example. At the time, OpenAI said it had improved the way the chatbot interacted with users, stating that the result was a bot that “feels more natural” compared to previous iterations.
In the case of ChatGPT 5.2, OpenAI noted its improvements in tool usage, coding, and document creation, but it was the personal interactions that were not enjoyable for many people. It highlights how OpenAI releases can sometimes focus on one area and sometimes another.
When we compared ChatGPT 5.2 to Google’s Gemini 3 chatbot, we found that the two options were evenly matched across a variety of tests. But it’s obvious that for some people, ChatGPT 5.2 just wasn’t up to par.
Since OpenAI recognizes discontent, it is very likely that we will see modifications to the chatbot that point it in the right direction for disgruntled users.
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