Jessica Mendoza

Pause everything and fix its biggest moneymaker.

He laid out a list of priorities for ChatGPT, and a familiar phrase came up.

Remember those?

The metrics that appeared to make ChatGPT's personality so comforting, but that also may have put mental health at risk?

The journal reported that Altman wanted to turn up the crank on that controversial source of training data, and that he now believed it was safer to do so after mitigating its worst effects.

A spokeswoman said OpenAI carefully balances user feedback with expert review.

For the next eight weeks, Altman's memo said, every other venture that wasn't ChatGPT should be seen as a side project on hold.

That meant emphasizing, at least in the short term, user engagement over the company's loftier goal of pursuing AGI, or artificial general intelligence.

Achieving AGI is the mission that OpenAI was founded on, the hope that the company could build a machine that thinks like us.

But for a long time, there have been tensions inside the company around what OpenAI's goals should be.

OpenAI's researchers focus less on the day-to-day tasks that a basic chatbot can do, like, say, helping someone draft a polite email.

Their goal of reaching AGI is a much longer-term project.

An OpenAI spokeswoman says there's no conflict between the two philosophies and that broad adoption of AI tools is how the company plans to distribute AGI's benefit.

Barbara, it seems like for now, at least, Altman is prioritizing one track, which is ChatGPT.

Why is that important?

Just today, with Google hot on its heels, OpenAI fired back with its latest model, GPT 5.2.

The company billed the update as its most advanced model yet.

This is also making me think, you know, with OpenAI having to grapple with all of these different things, the risks of driving engagement, falling behind Google.

Like, if OpenAI isn't the leading AI company, it seems like someone else will be.

Does it matter who leads this race, whether it's OpenAI, Google, or some other company?