Sam Altman and the whale

But where is the transition from the BlackBerry keyboard to the touch-screen iPhone? Where is the assisted GPS and the API for location services that enables real-time directions and gives rise to companies like Uber and Grindr and lets me order a taxi for my burrito? Where are the real breakthroughs? 

In fact, following the release of GPT-5, OpenAI found itself with something of a user revolt on its hands. Customers who missed GPT-4o’s personality successfully lobbied the company to bring it back as an option for its Plus users. If anything, that indicates the GPT-5 release was more about user experience than noticeable performance enhancements.

And yet, hours before OpenAI’s GPT-5 announcement, Altman teased it by tweeting an image of an emerging Death Star floating in space. On Thursday, he touted its PhD-level intelligence. He then went on the Mornings with Maria show to claim it would “save a lot of lives.” (Forgive my extreme skepticism of that particular brand of claim, but we’ve certainly seen it before.) 

It’s a lot of hype, but Altman is not alone in his Flavor Flav-ing here. Last week Mark Zuckerberg published a long memo about how we are approaching AI superintelligence. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei freaked basically everyone out earlier this year with his prediction that AI would harvest half of all entry-level jobs within, possibly, a year. 

The people running these companies literally talk about the danger that the things they are building might take over the world and kill every human on the planet. GPT-5, meanwhile, still can’t tell you how many b’s there are in the word “blueberry.” 

This is not to say that the products released by OpenAI or Anthropic or what have you are not impressive. They are. And they clearly have a good deal of utility. But the hype cycle around model releases is out of hand. 

I say that as one of those people who use ChatGPT or Google Gemini most days, often multiple times a day. This week, for example, my wife was surfing and encountered a whale repeatedly slapping its tail on the water. Despite having seen very many whales, often in very close proximity, she had never seen anything like this. She sent me a video, and I was curious about it too. So I asked ChatGPT, “Why do whales slap their tails repeatedly on the water?” It came right back, confidently explaining that what I was describing was called “lobtailing,” along with a list of possible reasons why whales do that. Pretty cool. 

But then again, a regular garden-variety Google search would also have led me to discover lobtailing. And while ChatGPT’s response summarized the behavior for me, it was also too definitive about why whales do it. The reality is that while people have a lot of theories, we still can’t really explain this weird animal behavior.