OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responds to ‘Chart-Crime moment’ during GPT-5 launch: ‘Wow a mega…’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has admitted that the company’s latest AI model – GPT-5 had a ‘bumpy’ launch. The confession was made during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Friday, August 8 where Altman and members of the GPT-5 team answered questions about new features, problems at launch, and the now-famous “chart crime”.
What is OpenAI’s ‘chart crime’ moment
During GPT-5’s presentation, a flawed chart sparked jokes online. The chart misrepresented SWE-bench Verified data, exaggerating GPT-5’s accuracy (74.9% with thinking, 52.8% without) compared to OpenAI o3 (69.1%) and GPT-4o (30.8%), likely due to swapped or misaligned bars, as noted in OpenAI’s own SWE-bench Verified documentation released on August 7, 2025.Altman called it a “mega chart screwup” on X (formerly Twitter), clarifying that the blog post charts were accurate.
Sam Altman on GPT-5’s ‘disappointing’ launch
One of GPT-5’s main features is a real-time router that decides whether to answer quickly or take extra time to “think.” But it failed on launch day, making the model appear “more bumpy,” Sam Altman said. “GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, we had a sev and the autoswitcher was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber,” he wrote.“Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often. We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query”, Sam Altman told Redditors.
ChatGPT Plus subscribers switch back to GPT-4o
After the GPT-5 launch, many users complained, saying GPT-4o worked better for their needs. To this, Sam Altman responded:“We are looking into letting Plus users continue to use 4o. We are trying to gather more data on the tradeoffs.” “We are going to double rate limits for Plus users as we finish rollout,” he added.
