#openai

Symphony turns project work into isolated, autonomous implementation runs, allowing teams to manage work instead of supervising coding agents.

After the 5.4 update, ChatGPT uses "goblin" in almost every conversation. Sometimes It's "gremlin." A recent chat of mine used goblin 3 times in 4 messages:

GPT-5 with reasoning (GPT-5 Thinking) follows instructions with a precision we haven’t seen before (GPT-4.1 was the exception, but lacked reasoning). What sounds like a feature flips established prompt-engineering practices on its head. The era of “shouting”—ALL CAPS, exclamation marks, redundant pleading—is over. Clear rules, explicit policies, and structured instructions now rule the day.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let's talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.

What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology", as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It's just tech, everything doesn't have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.

The most noteworthy thing about the public reaction to GPT5 (which Max Read summarizes as “A.I. as normal technology (derogatory)” is that it blew no one’s mind. If you find ChatGPT to be remarkable and life changing, then this next advance is pretty sweet. It’s a stepwise improvement on the existing product offerings. But it isn’t a quantum leap. No radical new capabilities have been unlocked. GPT5 is to GPT4 as the iPhone16 is to the iPhone 15 (or, to be charitable, the iPhone 12).

I feel like this is obvious but I’m not hearing it shouted from the rooftops so here it is: adding an untrusted middleman to your information diet and all of your personal communications will eventually become a disaster that will be obvious in hindsight.