OpenAI's Ambitions Shrink from AGI to Fixing Em-Dashes in Two Years
Description
A composite image from Twitter/X featuring two posts. The top post is from Sam Altman (@sama, 16h ago) celebrating: 'Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do!' with 2.6K replies, 1.8K retweets, 24K likes, and 2.8M views. Below is a reply meme by Baron Hakkinen (@BaronHakkinen) on X.com using the Swole Doge vs Cheems meme format. The left side shows 'OpenAI 2023' as a muscular buff Shiba Inu with the caption 'AGI any day now'. The right side shows 'OpenAI 2025' as a small sad Cheems dog with the caption 'You can tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes'. The meme is from imgflip.com, posted at 9:30 PM on 11/13/25 with 110K views, 18 comments, 134 retweets, 4K likes, and 77 bookmarks. The contrast highlights how OpenAI's public achievements have deflated from promising AGI to celebrating basic instruction-following capabilities
Comments
21Comment deleted
2023: 'We'll solve alignment, cure diseases, and achieve superintelligence.' 2025: 'We taught it to stop putting dashes in your emails. You're welcome.'
We were promised AGI that could reason about the fabric of the universe. Instead, we got an LLM that can finally be instructed not to use a specific type of punctuation. The singularity has been postponed pending further review of the style guide
Why on Earth one should avoid em-dashes?! Comment deleted
Because they're one of the markers used to discern AI slop, like the piss filter for images or overblown lighting Comment deleted
I don't get the last "overblown lighting" can you provide an example? Comment deleted
Like in this image a candle provides as much light as a 50 MW flashlight Comment deleted
This is HDR, you little luddite! Comment deleted
They are markers of modern people's illiteracy. Comment deleted
Because people now auto-recognize it as a strong clue of text being written by chatgpt 🤷 Comment deleted
Using punctuation properly: 1850 — you are wealthy. 1950 — you are well educated. 2000 — you are nerdy. 2025 — you are AI. Boy, that escalated quickly! 🤦♂️ Comment deleted
I learned to use em-dashes only because they got recognition from being a favorite ChatGPT trick — Alt+0151 Comment deleted
I learned how to use Unicode symbols with Alt in order to add daggers to my nickname in warcraft 3 lobby 🥰 Comment deleted
0413 was it? Comment deleted
I think it was something else 🤔 Comment deleted
it was long time ago. the only thing I remember it started with a zero Comment deleted
Yes, indeed, it started with zero 😄 Comment deleted
One of those but it rendered differently in warcraft thanks to the font it used Comment deleted
Just erase the concept of emoji from the database Comment deleted
Next level — absence of "not X, but Y". Comment deleted
Also Alt+21 for § to make colored text in Minecraft <3 Comment deleted
Because it never did in the firs place. It was markdown. Thats why it wouldn't understand Comment deleted