"Case in point, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently conceded that the company had "screwed up" the language capabilities of its latest chatbot iteration, GPT-5.2. "I think we just screwed that up," Altman said at a developer town hall on Monday. "We will make future versions of GPT 5.x hopefully much better at writing than 4.5 was." Continuing, Altman said that the company chose to focus on ChatGPT's technical capabilities, perhaps to the detriment of its human-language performance."
"The admission raises a high-stakes question: whether frontier AI models can continue to excel at tasks across the board, or if proficiency in one domain will start to come at the expense of a broader skill set. As Search Engine Journal points out, the release of GPT-5.2 came with a huge emphasis on technical tasks like coding andformatting spreadsheets. Compared to past iterations, there was scarce mention of any writing or creative work at all."
Commercially-available LLM chatbots have existed for a little over three years, with performance gains but signs of plateau. OpenAI's GPT-5.2 exhibited weaker human-language capabilities, and Sam Altman admitted the company "screwed up" those language features. Development priorities shifted toward intelligence, reasoning, coding, and engineering, with limited bandwidth leading to neglect of writing quality. The release emphasized technical tasks like coding and formatting spreadsheets, with scarce attention to creative writing. Many non-technical users report a flatter tone, worse translations, inconsistent behavior, and other regressions, raising concerns about trade-offs when optimizing for specific domains.
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