Forget AGI—Sam Altman celebrates ChatGPT finally following em dash formatting rules

When Altman celebrates finally getting GPT to avoid em dashes, he’s really celebrating that OpenAI has tuned the latest version of GPT-5.1 (probably through reinforcement learning or fine-tuning) to weight custom instructions more heavily in its probability calculations.

There’s an irony about control here: Given the probabilistic nature of the issue, there’s no guarantee the issue will stay fixed. OpenAI continuously updates its models behind the scenes, even within the…