- OpenAI’s Sam Altman says the company ‘screwed up’ with ChatGPT 5.2
- The focus was on technical skills, not user interactions
- Altman said OpenAI focuses on some features and must ‘neglect’ others
ChatGPT users are not shy about voicing their concerns when they feel an update has broken OpenAI’s 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” when implementing the change.
The comments came from OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who spoke at a town hall meeting for developers earlier this week. At the event, Altman was asked about negative user feedback surrounding ChatGPT 5.2, claiming 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 screwed it up,” he said, before continuing: “We’ll make future versions of GPT 5.x hopefully much better to type than 4.5 was.”
Interestingly, Altman blamed OpenAI’s decision to focus on ChatGPT 5.2’s technical aspects rather than its writing capabilities: “We decided, and I think for good reason, to put most of our effort into 5.2 to make it super good for intelligence, reasoning, coding, engineering, that sort of thing,” he said. “And we have limited bandwidth here, and sometimes we focus on one thing and neglect another.”
To make sacrifices
Altman’s explanation is illuminating because it sheds light on OpenAI’s decision-making practices. This suggests that there will always be elements of ChatGPT that must be sacrificed when trying to improve others. In the case of ChatGPT 5.2, it was perhaps more notable 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, claiming the result was a bot that “feels more natural” compared to previous iterations.
In the case of ChatGPT 5.2, OpenAI noted its improvements to tool use, coding, and document creation, but it was personal interactions that felt negative to many people. It highlights how OpenAI’s releases can sometimes focus on one area, and other times on another.
When we pitted ChatGPT 5.2 against Google’s Gemini 3 chatbot, we found that the two options were neck-and-neck across a number of tests. But it’s obvious that for some people, ChatGPT 5.2 just wasn’t up to scratch.
With OpenAI acknowledging the dissatisfaction, there’s a good chance we’ll see changes to the chatbot that point it back in the right direction for disgruntled users.
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