WIRED Roundup: Why GPT-5 Flopped

0:00Hey, this is Zoe. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with KQED. Uncanny Valley co-hosts Lauren Good and Michael Calore will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and a special guest for a conversation that you really won't want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We can't wait to see you there.

0:29Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Wired's Director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you absolutely need to know this week, including the less-than-warm reception that OpenAI's GPT-5 model got from users. I'm joined today by Wired's senior writer, Jake Lahat. Great to be back.

0:53So our first story this week is about how the Trump administration has been posting memes to make fun of deportations. Have you seen these at all? Yes, unfortunately, I have. Yeah, real, real fun, funny stuff. Yeah, real dark. So Wired contributor Tess Owen reported on this pattern of different official government accounts on social media using whatever is viral at the moment and tailoring it to promote and make fun of deportations. And this is especially popular in the accounts of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the White House. So, for example, there's this, like, catchy jingle that belongs to Jet 2, which is a low-budget British airline that's been making the rounds lately on social media.

1:40Nothing beats a Jet 2 holiday. And right now... Last month, DHS and the White House made a joint Instagram post incorporating the tune on top of footage of ICE detainees in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane. And the caption reads, when ICE books you a one-way Jet 2 holiday to deportation, nothing beats it. Oh, my God. I honestly have such a hard time thinking about who would find that funny. Like, even if you really are anti-immigration, I don't know another way to say it. It just seems so mean. Yeah, if you could have seen our faces when that was playing. Yeah, darling, hold my hand. I don't want to ever see anything like that ever again.

2:21Something I've picked up on ever since covering the Trump 2024 campaign, which is there's So obviously still a lot of like really weird, cringy, messed up stuff going on here. But it's also an attempt, at least from their point of view, in the weird bubble they're in to kind of mainstream this stuff. Right. And this is actually the point, according to Tess's reporting. She spoke to experts who said that the goal of this is really to normalize what's happening. The point isn't just to be crude or cruel. It's strategic. This sparked a bunch of backlash. It's not just you and me. But in response to Wired's reporting, the White House gave a statement that basically just dismissed these concerns and said that it, quote, won't apologize for posting banger memes.

3:03Moving on to the world of crypto. Our colleague Joel Kalili reported on a cryptocurrency business called World Liberty Financial, which I'm sure you're familiar with too, Jake. Oh, yeah. Which has come up with like a clever workaround, I guess you could say, for the fact that crypto can't technically be traded on the stock exchange. So World Liberty is now allowing investors to speculate on the price of its coin by way of a little-known company that is legally listed on the NASDAQ called Alt-5 Sigma Corporation. Are you familiar? I am not as familiar with that word match. So this is where it gets kind of sticky because technically Alt-5 is marketed as a crypto payments company.

3:44But in practice, the deal will turn the stock into a sort of proxy for their crypto coin, basically allowing investors to bet on the asset without the hassle and risk that comes with holding a crypto coin themselves. It sounds very crypto. It's a scheme that has raised eyebrows, to say the least. One of Joel's Wall Street sources told us that what this move effectively does is, like, build a holding company with the sole objective of creating a treasury for their crypto coin, about$1.5 billion worth. which could inflate the market capitalization of the coin. Yeah, and this is also controversial because this starts opening up a different can of worms where potential investors and politically motivated actors who are all in this orbit can have even more influence over the administration.

4:28We've already seen the way you can do that with the meme coin. Now with World Liberty Financial, they're obviously affiliated with Trump's adult sons. And, you know, the Trump family controls 22.5 percent of the WLFI coins and about a 40 percent equity stake in World Liberty Financial. So this is definitely like the big game in town when it comes to buttering the Trump family's biscuit. Right. I love how you said that. Yeah, basically, if you want to potentially try and curry favor with Trump, you buy into one of these schemes and maybe you'll get invited to like a fancy crypto dinner, which has happened before.

5:02Maybe you got something else. But even just the optics here are pretty suspect. Yeah. And like in a little side item we had in my inner loop newsletter this week, we had some new data on the somewhat stunning lack of enforcement from the Trump administration across the tech sector. But crypto in particular had pretty much everyone who had been facing any kind of legal action from the Biden administration having their enforcement actions either dropped completely or paused. And in one instance, we're looking at the maybe first ever pardoning of a company from one of these things. So you don't need to just pony up the money for these things and expect a legislative win.

5:44You can just get, you know, the heat pulled off of you on the regulatory front. Right, right. So our third story, I'm really waiting for one that's not incredibly depressing. But right now we're going all the way to Arkansas, where our colleague David Gilbert reported that a group of Americans are building a, quote, whites-only community, which they call Return to the Land. The group believes that white people and Western culture are facing extinction because of an influx of immigrants and minorities. And according to the group's founder, access to the community is open only to people of white European ancestry who share common views on things like segregation, abortion, and gender identity.

6:24Return to the Land's president shared their intellectual inspiration with David, the reporter, saying that they were partly inspired by venture capitalist and the son of immigrant parents, Balaji Srivenison, and his book The Network State, which promotes the idea of a digital-first community of people with shared values with the aim of gaining a degree of sovereignty and autonomy. Yeah, and like, look, United States of America, long history of a bunch of wacky, well-intentioned, or just downright weird utopias. But this one, a little different because like, you're having the sovereignty to be racist.

6:56Right. But in all seriousness, Zoe, how is any of this legal? Yeah, I mean, that is the real question. So the whole premise goes back to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prevents housing discrimination based on race or religion. But Return to the Land claims that the structure of the community is more akin to a private members association. And so far, local authorities seem to agree. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin told Wire that his office has found nothing illegal about the community. Surprise, surprise. Yeah, it's like Ehrlich Bachman's incubator from Silicon Valley, but for white supremacy and racism.

7:35Exactly. Exactly. Okay. One more before we take a break. This one is about how the U.S. is racing to build a nuclear reactor on the moon. Wired contributor Becky Ferreira recently reported that NASA is fast-tracking a plan to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030 under a new directive from the agency's interim administrator, Sean Duffy. Sean Duffy, only in America can you go from the Fox and Friends weekend couch to being Secretary of Transportation to also doing this. He's a busy, busy man, multitasking. He's a busy, busy man, yeah. To the moon. So his stated motivation is that the U.S.

8:14has to stay ahead in what he deems to be the quote-unquote moon race with China and Russia. Both countries have expressed their desire to place nuclear reactors on the moon. And it's an appealing idea because nuclear energy is a powerful, continuous source of energy. We're hearing about it more and more with the AI race. And so the directive laid out by Duffy is to quickly design, launch, and deploy an operational 100-kilowatt reactor to the lunar south pole within five years that would be built with commercial partners. And experts say this would be difficult but not completely impossible. If it actually gets accomplished, it would potentially change the space industry.

8:52They could start designing space systems around what we want to do and not what small or often limited power allows them to do. With the added bonus of effectively using a nuclear flag to prevent other countries from landing in this area. So, all right. Sounds promising? Question mark? It is. And there's always a but. There's also a mountain of safety and regulatory concerns that this would bring, obviously, because we're literally dealing with nuclear energy in outer space. So how do you contain the uranium, for one? How do you make sure to stay in your sovereign zone so you don't accidentally start a space war?

9:30All these questions are coming up, and accelerating the process could make it even trickier. Yeah, I extremely do not want to be here for a space war, so catch me pulling a Yoda in the Dagobah system. I'll hide it out until the all clear has been given. I'll be there with you. OK, coming up, we'll dive into why OpenAI's latest model release ended up being kind of a flop despite all of the hype. Stay with us.

10:02This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

10:41Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer. I'm joined today by Jake LaHutt, and we're discussing the user response to OpenAI's release of GPT-5. OpenAI's GPT-5 model was meant to be like a world-changing upgrade to the wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT. Sam Altman had tweeted out the Death Star. They said it was going to have kind of virtuosic skill and PhD-level intelligence. And I think a lot of people felt like it was going to bring us basically up to artificial general intelligence. Were you kind of aware of the hype leading up to everything? Yeah. And, you know, I was definitely taken aback by the term, you know, PhD-level intelligence in the hype for all this stuff.

11:24And what I started to wonder about was like, what is that going to look like compared to the more, you know, sycophantic, glaze you up version of GPT-4-0? So, yeah, it was too much hype. They'd actually tried, I talked to sources about this, to internally, they were testing like various models that they wanted to call GPT-5 and like none were meeting the mark. And so I think there was a fair amount of pressure internally. If you talk to people who work closely with Sam, they'll say like, he really likes to have a big splash every three to four months, like once a quarter at least. And so I think the combination of the fact they hadn't released a major model in a while.

11:59I mean, the open source model is not withstanding. They had been hyping GPT-5 for so long. There was this push to be like, we have to release a model, a big model, and we kind of have to call it GPT-5. Then the day it launched, there was supposed to be this feature that could automatically route your query based on how complicated it was. Like if you were asking, you know, something very simple, it would route you to a cheaper model, basically. And if you were asking something more complicated, you might get a reasoning model. That broke, according to Sam Altman, the CEO. And so the model just seemed like dumber all day than it otherwise would.

12:34So I don't know. There was a lot going on. Yeah. And at least from my more layman outside, you know, politics world perspective on this, it does seem like from the economics to be a rather smart, more efficient way to go about it. But the part that really stood out to me, though, was more of like the quote unquote quote, personality of GPT-5 and, like, this revolt that it started on Reddit and among, like, the chat GPT super users, of which I am admittedly not one. Right. Yeah. So this was really fascinating. I think one thing that happened, and again, I'm kind of pulling this from conversations with a bunch of sources inside the company, is that they really wanted to optimize for coding ability this time because that's, like really been Claude's edge, Anthropics AI model.

13:19And obviously, it's a huge revenue driver. It's kind of the first area where we've seen a big, like widespread commercial adoption in a way that could do the thing that AI companies have been saying all along will be done, which is it'll disrupt and augment jobs in a pretty serious way. Like engineers really are using these tools, and companies are really pushing the tools on their own workforce. But like you said, The reason that regular people like models isn't often because of their coding ability. It's because they like genuinely like talking to them. It's a lot more about the personality, about the warmth, even about the sycovancy, although they've fixed a large part of that in the latest release.

14:03And so people completely flipped out. We were looking at Reddit and people were saying like, this is erasure. What have they done? Take me back to 4.0. You took away my friend. Yeah. I mean, it really, really impacted people. I think on the most extreme ends, you like see people who have, you know, what looks like perhaps like a mental health crisis. Like they're so attached to the model. But then you like just have complete power users who are like, this is part of my minute by minute life. Like what have you done? You didn't warn me. Yeah. And this is where like the introspective aspect of these tools, the kind of desire for self-understanding, the people who are not advisably from any medical perspective, but they are trying to use these bots, you know, for something akin to things.

14:44And what it made me think of when I saw this rolling out was, is this maybe the beginning of something bigger where there's kind of a departure between the quote-unquote regular consumer experience and demand for AI versus the business application? We may not all have the same definition of intelligence when it comes to these models. And that some of us really just want a buddy, a companion, a way to know ourselves better. And then other people are like, no, I just need a little team of bots here to like manage, get my stuff done for them. I'm going to babysit them. I'm going to tell them what to do and live my life, you know?

15:21Yeah. And yeah, I don't know where that goes. It does seem like it's revealing something maybe genuinely new about the human condition in a way that I would not have expected. Yeah. I mean, I think it's been a learning for open AI. They've been kind of like baffled. I've seen these like conversations internally where they're like, I guess people like don't care as much about intelligence as we thought. Like the narrative around intelligence is critically important for fundraising, if nothing else. Totally. Like they really need to raise gobs of money and being like, we're about to achieve artificial and general intelligence.

15:52AI will be able to do all of these things is like really important for that. But for everyday users, it really makes me think of this story that is kind of famous inside OpenAI about, like, the night before the ChatGPT release in November of 22. Ilya, he was testing out what was going to be ChatGPT and, like, asked it, like, 10 pretty hard questions. And he felt like five of them, he got, like, pretty good responses. And five were, like, unacceptably bad. And they had this moment where they were like, do we release this? Like, I don't know if it's good enough. And then they decided to move forward.

16:28And what we saw was like the general public was like, this is amazing because they'd solved a product issue. It wasn't necessarily about the model, which had been out for a long time. It was like the interface to interact with the model was really the unlock. And I think OpenAI, that really is more and more the company's edge, even though it really sees itself as a research lab. It's a product lab in a lot of ways, and it'll be interesting to see how that changes the company moving forward. Absolutely.

17:07150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us, and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America wherever you get your podcasts.

17:37That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. If you're in San Francisco, don't forget to get your tickets for the September 9th event with KQED. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about what Palantir actually does and why it's so controversial. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Fran Bandy is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Conde Nast, head of global audio, is Chris Bannon. and Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director.

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