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 and requests to bring back its previous model, GPT-4o.

They also asked Altman 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 it 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: “We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback.”

AI-generated “brain rot” videos are popping up all over the internet and getting a lot of attention. Currently gaining traction among younger users, these clips feature wild characters, like a shark wearing sneakers and a ballerina with a cappuccino for a head.

One startup driving this trend is OpenArt, founded by two former Google employees in 2022. It touts around 3 million monthly active users.

The company recently launched a new “one-click story” feature in open beta, which allows users to input a single sentence, a script, or even a song and turn it into a one-minute video with a story arc. This can include anything from a light-hearted story for TikTok to more serious content like explainer videos or music videos for YouTube. OpenArt even envisions this feature being used for advertising.

With One-Click Story, there are three templates to choose from: Character Vlog, Music Video, or Explainer. For a character vlog, users start by uploading an image of their character and entering a prompt. If a song is uploaded, the software understands the lyrics and creates an animation that aligns with the song’s themes, like illustrating flowers blooming in a garden.

Users can edit individual clips by revisiting the editor’s storyboard mode and tweaking prompts for a more refined result. The platform aggregates over 50 AI models, allowing users to choose their preferred tools, such as DALLE-3, GPT, Imagen, Flux Kontext, and Stable Diffusion.

The goal of the new feature is to further lower the barrier for becoming an AI creator, a medium that remains immensely popular despite ongoing controversy. 

While these tools can be beneficial — like using video generators to quickly produce content with original characters and narratives — there are numerous ethical issues to address. These include imitating other artists’ styles, intellectual property rights, and the dangers of misuse and creating misinformation.

During testing, we noticed that the Character Vlog option may tread into a grey legal area due to the types of characters it offers — such as Pikachu, SpongeBob, and Super Mario — which could pose risks of intellectual property (IP) infringement. In June, Disney and Universal sued AI firm Midjourney over AI-generated images.

Users should be aware that if their videos are found to infringe another’s copyright, the video may be taken off social media platforms, and if the user is found to have contributed to the infringement, they can potentially be held liable under copyright law, which can result in legal action from the copyright holder.

“We try to be cautious around the IP infringement,” Coco Mao, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “When you upload some IP characters, by default, the models we use will reject them, and it’s not able to produce the IP character, but sometimes it slips.”

Mao added that the company is open to talking to major IP holders to get licensing for characters. 

One aspect that OpenArt believes sets it apart is its ability to maintain character consistency. It argues that, unlike the average video model that often relies on simple, standalone clips that users have to piece together into a cohesive story, OpenArt aims to ensure that both the visuals and the narrative remain consistent.

“A problem that a lot of AI couldn’t really handle well is to have the character consistent in the same video…If you don’t have the same character, then it’s hard to get immersed in the story,” Mao said. 

Looking ahead, the company plans to iterate on the one-click feature by allowing users to create videos featuring conversations between two different characters. Another plan on the roadmap is developing a mobile app.   

OpenArt operates on a credit-based system. It offers four plans, with the most basic costing $14 per month for 4,000 credits, which includes up to four One-Click stories, 40 videos, 4,000 images, and four characters. The advanced plan costs $30 per month for 12,000 credits and includes up to 12 One-Click stories. The Infinite plan is priced at $56 per month for 24,000 credits, and there is also a team plan available for $35/month per member.

OpenArt has raised $5 million in funding to date from Basis Set Ventures and DCM Ventures, and it boasts a positive cash flow. Additionally, the company said it’s on track to achieve an annual revenue rate of over $20 million.

Robert Keele said this week that he has stepped down as xAI’s head of legal after just over a year, saying he wants to spend more time with his children. In his announcement, Keele also acknowledged “daylight between our worldviews” with boss Elon Musk, who hasn’t commented on Keele’s exit.

“I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough,” Keele wrote, posting the news on both X and LinkedIn. Despite calling his time at the AI startup “incredible” and working with Musk “the adventure of a lifetime,” he said he couldn’t keep “riding two horses at once — the family and the job.”

Keele’s news prompted an outpouring of support on social media from xAI colleagues as well as parents. When he joined xAI in May 2024 as its first legal head, he had just launched his own, very short-lived fractional legal outfit. “Keele Law had a good run (~3 weeks!), but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to run legal at xAI,” he wrote at the time, calling himself “beyond stoked, and insanely lucky.”

Keele arrived just before xAI announced a massive $6 billion Series B funding round in May 2024, backed by heavy hitters like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $24 billion. Soon after, xAI began experiencing rapid growth and, in March of this year, acquired X, Musk’s social media company, in a deal that, said Musk at the time, valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.

Before his entrepreneurial stint, Keele had been head of legal at autonomous aircraft maker Elroy Air and general counsel at Airbus’s Silicon Valley innovation center.

Taking over is Lily Lim, who, before becoming a lawyer, was a rocket scientist at NASA, working on spacecraft navigation for the project that mapped Venus’s surface. She joined xAI in late 2024 as a privacy and IP specialist after legal stints at numerous firms and companies like ServiceNow.

Keele’s departure fits an ongoing pattern of executive turnover across Musk’s empire. X CEO Linda Yaccarino left last month, and Tesla has lost several top executives recently. Musk — who also has numerous longstanding lieutenants — openly expects employees to work long hours, even if it means sleeping at the office, as happened when he acquired X, formerly Twitter.

Some newer companies appear to have adopted a similar mentality to get ahead of rivals, including AI coding startup Cognition, which is looking to aggressively shrink its team. In fact, its CEO recently told employees in an email that he doesn’t believe in work-life balance.