Sam Altman addresses ‘bumpy’ GPT-5 rollout, bringing 4o back, and the ‘chart crime’

During a Reddit ask-me-anything session on Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and key members of the GPT-5 team were peppered with questions about the new model, notably why it was working so poorly, especially the automatic model switching.

The team was also flooded with requests to bring back its previous model, GPT-4o. And Altman was asked about the most embarrassing – and perhaps funniest – snafu in the presentation, the “chart crime.”

One of the new features that GPT-5 rolled out is a real-time router that decides which model to use for a particular prompt, either responding quickly or taking additional time to “think” through answers.

But multiple people in the AMA on the r/ChatGPT Reddit complained GPT-5 wasn’t working as well for them as 4o did. Altman said the reason GPT-5 seemed “dumber” was the router wasn’t working properly when it was rolled out Thursday.

“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. 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,” Altman promised.

Still, people on the AMA lobbied so hard to bring 4o back for Plus subscribers that Altman promised to at least look into that. “We are looking into letting Plus users to continue to use 4o. We are trying to gather more data on the tradeoffs,” he wrote.

And Altman also promised, “We are going to double rate limits for Plus users as we finish rollout.” This should give people a chance to play and learn the new model, adopt to their use cases without worry of running out of monthly prompts.

Predictably, he was also asked about the wildly inaccurate chart the team presented during the live presentation that quickly became the butt of many “chart crime” jokes. The chart presented a lower benchmark score with a much taller bar. 

Altman didn’t answer questions about the chart during the AMA, but on Thursday he did call the chart a “mega chart screwup” on X. Others noted the charts in the published blog post were correct.

But the damage was done. Jokes ensued about using GPT for charts in a corporate presentation. GPT-5 reviewer Simon Willison, who had early access and generally liked the model’s performance, also pointed out that turning data into a table was “good example of a GPT-5 failure.”

In any case, Altman promised fixes to the items that seemed to concern people the most. He ended the AMA with a promise that “We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback.”