OpenAI Releases ChatGPT 5.1 With Team Alignment Mode

0:00ChatGPT has a couple interesting new features they've launched recently I want to cover on the show today Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer, of course. The first one is that ChatGPT has a pilot group where they're doing these group chats for ChatGPT. They're doing it in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan. It's kind of interesting. They have like select geographic locations and it is just like a regular ChatGPT chat experience, except you have a whole bunch of people that can, you know, tune in, chime in on this chat. What is it going to be used for? How does this work? You know, what is the point of this?

0:36Great questions. I'll be getting into all of that on the show today. But before I do, I wanted to say there is one other story I'm very excited about, which is that Google or that OpenAI has finally fixed ChatGPT's emdash problem, which I'm sure all of you have experienced before. If you ask ChatGPT to write basically anything, almost every paragraph, they're going to use the emdash in there. And it's just a giveaway that you're using AI to write your content. It's just annoying. And you have to kind of go through and backspace them all. Um, anyways, this problem has been solved. So Sam Altman was recently on Twitter and he posted, he said, small, but happy win.

1:13If you tell chat GP not to use M dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. This is all with the GPT 5.1 update. Now, how have people been responding this to this? Um, someone posted a meme right under his thing, which says like open AI in 2023. And then it's like the meme of like the doge dog. And it's like super ripped. It's like the bodybuilder. And then it's saying like, AGI any day now. And then right next to it, it says OpenAI in 2025. And it's like a small, wimpy doge dog crying. And it says, you can tell ChatGPT not to use MDashes. So, I mean, I think this just kind of goes to show we've had a lot of AI hype.

1:50People are a little bit jaded that we talked so much about AGI in the last two years. And now we are making posts about MDashes being removed from ChatGPT with the latest update of GPT 5.1. I think that's funny. Someone else said OpenAI killed another startup and they just have some code that says text replace MDash with nothing. So anyways, it's funny. If that really was somebody's startup, it deserved to die a sad death. Someone said, I told it to stop using MDashes. It replied with an MDash, peak betrayal. And they showed their screenshot saying don't use MDashes and it used an MDash in the response.

2:28So it evidently is not perfect. I'm also going to say something that drove me crazy with this new GPT 5.1 update is that in their demo, they're like, you can tell it to respond using only six words. So I was testing it and I was like, okay, only respond using six words. Tell me a joke. And then it was like, told me a joke. And I was like, hey, that's great. Tell me another one. It told me another one, but it used seven words. And I'm like, that's using seven words. And so I was like, oh, I'm sorry. And it fixed it to six words. Okay. That was my experience. And I'm like, whatever. It's sort of good.

2:56It's not perfect. and then any message I sent to chat GPT today after that it would I'd be like hey like write write a paragraph about xyz and it would like write it in the right six words and I'm like what is this and it's like I'm only using six words like you said and I'm like oh my gosh I like three times it kept doing that on different things and I well you know I'd always be like hey you can use more than six words and continue but then like the next time I'd start a new chat it would have remembered that so I don't know what that glitch is but watch out uh it saves things to memory that are like obviously one-off things.

3:27Like you say, just respond using six words. I'm not saying for all of eternity, only ever respond with six words. Like that's ridiculous. Somehow it interpreted it that way. So watch out. And then I just very explicitly had to say, remove my command for six words from your, uh, you know, from your history or your memory. And I was like, okay, we removed it from the memory. Now we can do like longer stuff. And I'm like, okay, whatever. So it seems like this is like a new rollout of GPT 5.1. It's a lot more empathetic. It's a lot more kind. I've seen the demos. I've seen it respond. Overall, I think it's good, but you do have to watch out.

3:58It does have some funny quirks like every single OpenAI rollout that I've seen them do. There are always funny quirks, so watch out with chatGPT5.1. By the way, GPT5.1 really felt like it just slipped under the radar. One thing that I do appreciate that they're doing there is that the naming convention is a lot more sane, not GPT4, GPT4.0 mini ultra max, I just feel like there's all these random weird words and you never knew what model was the best for anything. Apparently now they just have GPT-5. It's going to be 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 until they decide that it's a completely new model. Then they'll go to GPT-6.

4:37We don't know what's entailed or when that model might come out of training. But overall, it feels like they're just kind of making these minor improvements. I'm happy that we have stuck to a sane naming convention. I think they were really worried and trying to get away from naming anything GPT-5 for a long time because it had so much hype built around it. And that's why they came up with all these weird names. It seems like we're just onto normal names now. So that's fantastic. All right. At the beginning of the episode, I was telling you about a new group chat feature on ChatGPT that OpenAI is rolling out.

5:05It's in select countries and it is on the free tier. It's on any tier. There's a couple of things that I find interesting with it. I mean, the first big question is like, what is this for? Like you could imagine maybe a group assignment for a class where you like ask questions and everyone can ask the chat GPT questions about the assignment and get like responses. Like perhaps, I don't know, that doesn't seem incredibly useful to me when you could just probably use independent ones, but maybe it is. Maybe you are, you know, starting a project, you get like half of the document or the job done and you send it over to someone else to like review it and tweak it.

5:40So maybe that's, maybe that's kind of useful actually. Yeah, I guess, I guess that's probably a better use case. I'm talking myself into it. they have like the ability for you to have up to 20 people in the group. And to me, like thinking about like a group chat with 20 people, it seems like out of control. But if there's like a, if you kind of have like a pre-setup workflow, like, okay, I'm going to go work on coming up with the outline for this. And then I want you to go and flesh out like this component. And then Jeff's going to go flesh out that component. And Seth is going to go flesh out that component, right?

6:09Like if you kind of have like an overview of what's going to happen ahead of time, maybe in a normal group text chat, then everyone can go work on the document and everyone can get their part of it done on a project. So maybe that's useful. I actually think the most common thing this is going to get used for is just sending it over to one person where you're like, hey, I did XYZ. Can you go take this document and do this other thing to it? And you just send them the chat and they can keep working on it. I think that's going to be what it's mostly used for. Probably not these big 20 groups, but probably just two people sending it back and forth.

6:39One interesting thought on it or thing that it does is that if users are under 18, the content is filtered. OpenAI has obviously started opening up their content to be a little bit more wild like Grok or XAI. And so it's interesting that if you have multiple people in the same chat thread, if people are younger, below a certain age, it's going to get filtered to only things that are appropriate for them. There's going to be safeguards and parental controls in place. So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out and if this becomes more popular and they roll it out to more countries.

7:11I'll keep you up to date on all of that. In any case, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you could leave a rating over on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, it helps us show a ton. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and make sure to go check out AIbox.ai for all of the best AI models in one place, 20 bucks a month. It's my own startup. The link is in the description. I'll catch you guys next time.