sobiolite 4 hours ago

There are versions of both these charts with more plausible numbers and bar sizes in the "evaluation" section of the announcement post:

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5/

So, maybe this is just sloppiness and not intentionally misleading. But still, not a good look when the company burning through billions of dollars in cash and promising to revolutionize all human activity can't put together a decent powerpoint.

  • insane_dreamer an hour ago

    > can't put together a decent powerpoint.

    probably AI generated

marvinborner 5 hours ago

This should also include the chart on "Coding deception" [1] which is quite deceptive (50.0 is not in fact less than 47.4)

[1]: https://youtu.be/0Uu_VJeVVfo?t=1840

  • zmmmmm 3 hours ago

    I pasted the image of the chart into ChatGPT-5 and prompted it with

    >there seems to be a mistake in this chart ... can you find what it is?

    Here is what it told me:

    > Yes — the likely mistake is in the first set of bars (“Coding deception”). The pink bar for GPT-5 (with thinking) is labeled 50.0%, while the white bar for OpenAI o3 is labeled 47.4% — but visually, the white bar is drawn shorter than the pink bar, even though its percentage is slightly lower.

    So they definitely should have had ChatGPT review their own slides.

    • zeroonetwothree 2 hours ago

      Does it work that well if you don’t tell it there is a mistake though?

      • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF an hour ago

        That's the secret, you should always tell it to doubt everything and find a mistake!

  • qwertox 5 hours ago

    Both the submission and your link took me way too long to see what's the issue here.

    What were they even thinking? Don't they care about this? Is their AI generating all their charts now and they don't even bother to review it?

    • windowdoor 4 hours ago

      My unjustified and unscientific opinion is that AI makes you stupid.

      That's based solely on my own personal vibes after regularly using LLMs for a while. I became less willing to and capable of thinking critically and carefully.

      • nicce 4 hours ago

        It also scares me how good they are in appealing and social engineering. They have made me feel good about poor judgment and bad decision at least twice (which I noticed later on, still in time). New, strict system prompt and they give the opposite opinion and recommend against their previous suggestion. They are so good at arguing that they can justify almost anything and make you believe that this is what you should do unless you are among the 1% experts in the topic.

        • lacy_tinpot 3 hours ago

          > They are so good at arguing that they can justify almost anything

          This honestly just sounds like distilled intelligence. Because a huge pitfall for very intelligent people is that they're really good at convincing themselves of really bad ideas.

          That but commoditized en masse to all of humanity will undoubtedly produce tragic results. What an exciting future...

        • Terr_ 2 hours ago

          > They are so good at arguing that they can justify almost anything

          To sharpen the point a bit, I don't think it's genius "arguing" or logical jujitsu, but some simpler factors:

          1. The experience has reached a threshold where we start to anthropomorphize the other end as a person interacting with us.

          2. If there were a person, they'd be totally invested in serving you, with nearly unlimited amounts of personal time, attention, and focus given to your questions and requests.

          3. The (illusory) entity is intrinsically shameless and appears ever-confident.

          Taken together, we start judging the fictional character like a human, and what kind of human would burn hours of their life tirelessly responding and consoling me for no personal gain, never tiring, breaking-character, or expressing any cognitive dissonance? *gasp* They're my friend now and I should trust them. Keeping my guard up is so tiring anyway, so I'm sure anything wrong is either an honest mistake or some kind of misunderstanding on my part, right?

          TLDR: It's not not mentat-intelligence or even eloquence, but rather stuff that overlaps with culty indoctrination tricks and con[fidence]-man tactics.

      • lacy_tinpot 3 hours ago

        AI being used to completely off load thinking is a total misuse of the technology.

        But at the same time that this technology can seemingly be misused and cause really psychological harm is kind of a new thing it feels like. Right? Like there are reports of AI Psychosis, don't know how real it is, but if it's real I don't know any other tool that's really produced that kind of side effect.

      • II2II 4 hours ago

        No. AI is a tool to make ourselves look stupid. Suggesting that it makes people stupid suggest that they are even looking at the output.

    • panarky 4 hours ago

      Since everyone assumes GPT hallucinated these charts, the truth must be that they're 100% pure, organic, unadulterated human fuckups.

      • croes 4 hours ago

        Doesn’t matter. Either way is bad

        • datadrivenangel 4 hours ago

          Either way is bad. Intentionally human made and approved is worse than machine generated and not reviewed. Malicious versus sloppy.

          • croes 2 hours ago

            Machine generated is worse.

            How many charts will the person create, how many the machine?

    • sundarurfriend an hour ago

      > Both the submission and your link took me way too long to see what's the issue here.

      Mission accomplished for them then.

    • brundolf 2 hours ago

      It makes Apple's charts look rigorous and transparent

  • p1necone 5 hours ago

    This half makes sense to me - 'deception' is an undesirable quality in an llm, so less of it is 'better/more' from their audiences perspective.

    However, I can't think of a sensible way to actually translate that to a bar chart where you're comparing it to other things that don't have the same 'less is more' quality (the general fuckery with graphs not starting at 0 aside - how do you even decide '0' when the number goes up as it approaches it), and what they've done seems like total nonsense.

    • JBiserkov 4 hours ago

      > 'deception' is an undesirable quality in an llm, so less of it is 'better/more' from their audiences perspective

      So if that ^ is why 50.0 is lower than 47.4 ... but why is then 86.7 not lower than 9.0? Or 4.8 not lower than 2.1

brundolf 2 hours ago

Scaling aside, "without thinking" vs "with thinking" will never not be funny to me

I_am_tiberius 5 hours ago

It would be interesting to know how this occurred. I assume there may have been last-minute high-level feedback suggesting: "We can't let users see that the new model is only slightly better than the old one. Adjust the y-axis to make the improvement appear more significant."

  • danpalmer 4 hours ago

    Maybe they asked GPT-5 to update slides.

    • qustrolabe 4 hours ago

      GPT-5 would've caught this mismatch for sure

      • datadrivenangel 4 hours ago

        Claude and ChatGPT actually took me several prompts to get them to identify this. They recognized from a screenshot that labeled axes that start at zero can be misleading, but missed the actual issue.

        • nonhaver 3 hours ago

          thats hilarious actually. gives credence to the gpt theory haha

      • macNchz 4 hours ago

        That seemingly depends a bit on how hard you ask it to think, or how hard it decides to think based on your question.

        • danpalmer 3 hours ago

          "ChatGPT, this slide deck feels a bit luke warm, help me make a better impression"

          I could completely believe someone who is all-in on the tech, working in marketing, and not really that familiar with the failure modes, using a prompt like this and just missing the bad edit.

  • zigzag312 5 hours ago

    There's only one error, bar height for o3. Somehow height uses value from 4o, which seems like some sort of copy paste error.

    EDIT: I was looking just at the first chart. I didn't see there's more below.

    • croes 4 hours ago

      Did you miss the picture below where the bar for 50% is lower than the bar for 47.4%

      And even if it’s just one chart. There are 3 or 4 bars (depends on how you count) so they screwed up 33%/25 % of the chart.

      Quite an error margin.

      • zigzag312 4 hours ago

        Oh, I did miss it. Thanks!

  • lnenad 5 hours ago

    I mean this is the industry standard. For example every time Nvidia dumps a new GPU into the ether, they do the same thing. Apple with M series CPUs. They even go a step further and compare a few generations back.

    • datadrivenangel 5 hours ago

      It's dishonest and the multiple examples in the same presentation tell you what you need to know about the credibility of the presenters

  • outside1234 4 hours ago

    There is a smell of desperation around OpenAI, so I wouldn't be surprised if this level of hypevibing came from the top.

  • andrewstuart2 5 hours ago

    The other chart on that slide was actually to scale. My suspicion is that it was super rushed to the deadline for this presentation and they maybe didn't use excel or anything automatic for the charts, so they look better, and they missed the detail due to time pressure.

burnt-resistor an hour ago

The next management consulting flavor of the month will be full spectrum, panopticon RTO employee monitoring to ensure employees are doing work themselves, not using LLMs, and not working other jobs. It will be scored by AI, of course.

GodelNumbering 2 hours ago

Whichever model they used was probably sabotaged with a prompt like "your prime goal is to make GPT-5 look better in comparison"

atleastoptimal 2 hours ago

Why are they so sloppy? Is it because they want to go viral with le funny bad graphs? I'm sure AI could handle "converting test results in an excel document to a visual graph"

  • enraged_camel 2 hours ago

    The most plausible explanation IMHO is that they are moving at a million miles per hour, and someone forgot to replace some placeholder graphics.

    • an0malous 2 hours ago

      why would the placeholder graphics be the exact same but with incorrect heights on the bars?

interweb_tube 5 hours ago

I'll always invest in a chart that's more pink than gray.

  • burnt-resistor an hour ago

    Green for good on stacked bar charts is the new hotness.

subtlesoftware 4 hours ago

The 69.1 column has the same height as the 30.8 column. My guess is they just duplicated the 30.8 column and forgot to adjust the height to the number, which passed a cursory check because it was simply lower than the new model.

This doesn't explain the 50.0 column height though.

  • chilmers 4 hours ago

    Eyeballing it, that bar looks to be around 15% in height. Typing "50" instead of "15" is a plausible typo. Albeit, one you might expect from a high-schooler giving a class presentation, not in a flagship launch by one of the most hyped startups in history.

    Just remember, everyone involved with these presentations is getting a guaranteed $1.5 million bonus. Then cry a little.

  • dragonwriter 4 hours ago

    > The 69.1 column has the same height as the 30.8 column. My guess is they just duplicated the 30.8 column and forgot to adjust the height to the number

    Why, unless specifically for the purpose of making it possible to do inaccurate and misleading inconsistencies off this type, would you make charts for a professional presentation by a mechanism that involved separately manually creating the bars and the labels in the first place? I mean, maybe, if you were doing something artistic with the style that wasn't supported in charting software you might, but these are the most basic generic bar charts except for the inconsistencies.

TheAceOfHearts an hour ago

There's a social media engagement tactic where people will deliberately add specially tailored elements to content in order to bait people into commenting about it. I wonder if there was some deeper strategy to this chart being used during their presentation or if it really was just a blunder.

Maybe the fact that there were additional blunders, such as the incorrect explanation of the Bernoulli Effect, suggests that the team responsible for organizing this presentation didn't review every detail carefully. Maybe I'm reading too much into a simple mistake.

guluarte 2 hours ago

The worst part is that a company like OpenAI is full of data scientists who are supposed to be experts in charts.

sbaidon94 3 hours ago

What a perfect way to encapsulate the zeitgeist

pryelluw 3 hours ago

Similar to the glass demonstration on the cybertruck.

Eji1700 3 hours ago

OpenAI has always known that "data" is part of marketing, and treated it as such. I don't think this is intentional, but they damn well knew, even back in the dota 2 days, how to present data in such a way as to overstate the results and hide the failures.

44za12 5 hours ago

That was quick, vibe coded, I presume?

  • datadrivenangel 5 hours ago

    The CSS animations are very revealing on that front from a performance perspective.

    • teaearlgraycold 5 hours ago

      I tend to blame performance issues on the developer writing the code on a top of the line computer. There are too many WebGL effects on startup websites that were built to run on a M4 Max.

      • thewebguyd 5 hours ago

        > There are too many WebGL effects on startup websites that were built to run on a M4 Max.

        Tale as old as time. When the retina display macs first came out, we say web design suddenly no longer optimized for 1080p or less displays (and at the time, 1376x768 was the default resolution for windows laptops).

        As much suffering as it'd be, I swear we'd end up with better software if we stopped giving devs top of the line machines and just issued whatever budget laptop is on sale at the local best buy on any given day.

        • p1necone 5 hours ago

          Develop on a super computer, test on $200 laptop - not really any suffering that way.

          • xpe 3 hours ago

            To keep a fast feedback loop, build on the fast machine, deploy, test on the slow one.

        • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 5 hours ago

          At my work every dev had two machines, which was great. The test machine is cattle, you don't install GCC on it, you reflash it whenever you need, and you test on it routinely. And it's also the cheapest model a customer might have. Then your dev machine is a beast with your kitten packages installed on it.

        • teaearlgraycold 5 hours ago

          I wouldn't go that far, but maybe split the difference at a modern i3 or the lowest spec Mac from last year.

          It would be awesome if Apple or someone else could have an in-OS slider to drop the specs down to that of other chips. It'd probably be a lot of work to make it seamless, but being able to click a button and make an M4 Max look like an M4 would be awesome for testing.

          • p1necone 5 hours ago

            Tbh even the absolute lowest spec Mx macs are insanely powerful, probably best to test on a low end x86 laptop.

          • universenz 4 hours ago

            No no no.. go one better for the Mac. It should be whichever device/s which are next to be made legacy from Apple’s 7 year support window. That way you’re actually catering to the lowest common denominator.

  • seba_dos1 5 hours ago

    It's less than 200 lines of CSS. Easily doable by a human in 30 minutes.

    • mattgreenrocks 5 hours ago

      I love how this has to be defended now, as if that was somehow unthinkable from a domain expert.

zmmmmm 3 hours ago

it's so funny that it tried to deceive everybody about it's deceptiveness

smcleod 2 hours ago

Looks like the site has succumbed to the HN hug of death:

> Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.

> We can’t connect to the server at www.vibechart.net.

lunarcave 2 hours ago

We're fast approaching the point where vibeX is becoming derogatory.

  • JoshTriplett an hour ago

    It was (accurately) derogatory on day one, even if its proponents didn't recognize that.

datadrivenangel 4 hours ago

People interested in misleading data visualization should look into Alberto Cairo's Book: How Charts Lie

an0malous 2 hours ago

man some frontend devs just got $1.5M grants to do this

welder 3 hours ago

At first I thought this was metrics about vibe coding... but it's not, that's WakaTime

mgg90 3 hours ago

the jumping game it created has the easiest way to beat it. You can keep jumping indefinitely and never hit an obstacle. Probably an extra prompt would fix that, but its funny they published as is.

KaoruAoiShiho 5 hours ago

I think this is less chart crime than an editing mistake.

mcs5280 4 hours ago

How else can you make stonks go up perpetually?

  • eddythompson80 4 hours ago

    Weren’t some people, unironically, expecting AgI announcement for GPT-5. Like I have heard a water cooler (well, coffee machine) conversation about how OpenAI master plan is to release GPT-5 and invoke the AGI clause in their contract with Microsoft. I was shaking my head so hard,

    • JBiserkov 4 hours ago

      They are both using the "capitalist" definition of AGI, that is "an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits". I think it's short for "A Gazillion Idiots"...

      https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-...

      • AIPedant 3 hours ago

        It is actually incredible how they managed to find an even more unscientific definition than "can perform a majority of economically useful tasks." At least that definition requires a little thought to recognize it has problems[1]. $100bn in profits is just cartoonishly dumb, like you asked a high schooler to come up with a definition.

        [1] If a computer can perform the task its economic usefulness drops to near zero, and new economically useful tasks which computers can't do will take its place.

dmezzetti 5 hours ago

Impressive that this knocked GPT-5 from the top.

0xCafeBabee 4 hours ago

Looks like the only thing getting smarter here is the marketing team.

nabla9 4 hours ago

This is what eating your own dog food looks like when you are selling dog food.

  • SpaceNoodled 2 hours ago

    That's not really a fair comparison. Dog food has nutritive value.

  • WD-42 an hour ago

    I can’t believe I’ve never heard this one before. So apt.

  • echelon 3 hours ago

    Is this the moment the bubble pops (at least for OpenAI)?

    GPT-5 has to be one of the most underwhelming releases to date, and that's fresh on the heels of the "gift" of GPT-OSS.

    The hottest news out of OpenAI lately is who Mark Zuckerberg has added to Meta's "Superintelligence" roster.

    • sothatsit an hour ago

      GPT-5 is probably going to be a meaningful improvement for most of my non-technical family members who like ChatGPT but have never used anything other than 4o. In fact, most of the people I know who use ChatGPT pay no attention to the model being used, except for the developers I know. This update is going to be a big deal for them.

      For me, it's just another nice incremental improvement. Nothing special, but who doesn't like smarter better models? The drop in hallucination rates also seems meaningful for real-world usage.

    • GaggiX 2 hours ago

      GPT-5 models are actually great models for the API, the nano model is finally good enough to handle complex structured responses and it's even cheaper than GPT-4.1-nano.

    • outside1234 2 hours ago

      The gift of GPT-OSS that is actually Phi

  • EMIRELADERO 3 hours ago

    Saved. Thanks for that belly laugh.

enb 5 hours ago

Can’t scroll on safari ios

  • acenturyandabit 5 hours ago

    The chart is the entire thing. Check if the numbers match the heights of the rectangles ;)

    • eps 5 hours ago

      Still only half of it is visible in the landscape mode and the page is not scrollable.

nnurmanov 4 hours ago

In the marketing world 1>2:)

bo1024 4 hours ago

Aw, I really wanted this to be a tool to produce your own misleading vibecharts

rvz 5 hours ago

Remember, we are in a post-truth era. Getting to "AGI" might even mean cooking the numbers if they have to so that hopefully no-one notices.

schappim 5 hours ago

Imagine being the person who made the mistake when creating the gpt-5 chart.

  • burnt-resistor an hour ago

    It should've been coded to auto-detect the current highest GPT generation/version and add 2. Sigh.

  • cpncrunch 5 hours ago

    Link?

    • datadrivenangel 4 hours ago
      • cpncrunch 3 hours ago

        No, i mean what is the context. Who created this originally? Where is the link to openai or whoever creating this chart, or context behind the misinformation if any. I check the comments and stories about chatgpt5 and there is no reference to this, so im at a loss.

        Ok, I see there was a bug on the site and it wasn't scrolling on iOS. They fixed that now, although the background context is still unclear, and none of the links in the site seem to explain it.

        • datadrivenangel 2 hours ago

          These charts were from the GPT-5 release stream from OpenAI. The second image is a direct screenshot:

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uu_VJeVVfo&t=1840s

          • cpncrunch 26 minutes ago

            Yes, that second image was initially hidden on iOS due to the scrolling bug in the site (now fixed).

            So they spotted what seems to be an unintentional error in a chart in a youtube video, and created a completely different chart with random errors to make a point, while due to their own coding error the (somewhat obtuse) explanation wasn't even visible on mobile devices.

            Not sure why this was voted to the top of the first page of HN, although I can surmise.

outside1234 4 hours ago

People at OpenAI are the top of their field. It is not sloppiness in this crowd.

  • ceejayoz 3 hours ago

    People at the top of their field can be deeply sloppy at times.

    • steve_adams_86 2 hours ago

      I mean it in the kindest way, but scientists might be the sloppiest group I've worked with (on average, at least). They do amazing work, but they're willing to hack it together in the craziest ways sometimes. Which is great in a way. They're very resourceful and focused on the science, not necessarily the presentation or housekeeping. That's fine.

      • pphysch 2 hours ago

        This isn't scientist sloppy, this is salesperson sloppy. Very different.

  • johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

    The engineers, sure. Product team... well, we've seen the past 2-3 years that AI isn't necessarily based on quality and accuracy. They are also at the top of their game in terms of how to optimize revenue.

  • bigfishrunning an hour ago

    Just because you're the best, doesn't mean you're any good

  • teaearlgraycold 3 hours ago

    I don't think the PR people at OpenAI are at the top of their field.

sp527 5 hours ago

It's such an egregiously bad error, you almost have to wonder if Altman did it intentionally for publicity (which does seem to be working).

  • p1necone 4 hours ago

    I think the stock market has just proven time and time again that a large proportion of investors (and VCs) do basically no due diligence or critical thinking about what they're throwing money at, and businesses actually making profit hasn't mattered for a long time - which was the only thing tethering their value to the actual concrete stuff they're building. If you can hype it well your share price goes up, and even the investors that do do due proper diligence can see that and so they're all in too.

    By and large people do not have the integrity to even care that numbers are obviously being fudged, and they know that the market is going to respond positively to blustering and bald faced lies. It's a self reinforcing cycle.

    • sp527 4 hours ago

      Oh trust me I know. I worked at Palantir well before it was public and had firsthand experience of Alex Karp. He would draw incomprehensible stick figure box diagrams on a whiteboard for F100 CEOs, ramble some nonsensical jargon, and somehow close a multimillion dollar pilot. The guy is better at faking it than high-end escorts. It doesn't surprise me that this has fooled degens around the world, from Wall Street to r/wallstreetbets. Incredibly, even Damadoran has thrown in the towel and opened a position, while still admitting he has no idea what they do.

yoyohello13 5 hours ago

It’s genuinely terrifying that people this incompetent have so much money and power.

  • fullshark 4 hours ago

    It’s more terrifying that no one cares about the truth it seems anywhere. Vibeworld, we are all selling vaporware and if you don’t build it who cares move into the next hype cycle that pumps the stock / gets VC funding. Absurd industry.

    • pesus 3 hours ago

      We're feeling the effects of living in a post-truth society more and more every day. It's pretty terrifying.

  • burnt-resistor an hour ago

    In the US political sphere, this is why legitimized corruption must be eliminated before it eliminates us.

  • m_herrlich 5 hours ago

    It might not incompetent to assume the audience is not very discerning

    • aydyn 5 hours ago

      OpenAI is currently getting dunked on, on all major platforms. It is incompetent.

    • throwawayoldie 4 hours ago

      People reading Hacker News are the target audience, and here we are, discerning.

      • Invictus0 4 hours ago

        Speak for yourself!

        • throwawayoldie 4 hours ago

          I only ever do. But I rephrased my post to make my meaning clearer. Nice discernment there.

  • ElijahLynn 4 hours ago

    The magic that is ChatGPT is definitely not incompetence.

    They may not be perfect, but they provided a lot of value to many different industries including coding.

outside1234 4 hours ago

[flagged]

  • dang an hour ago

    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and we've asked you many times to stop.

    If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

thimabi 4 hours ago

Poor OpenAI workers, they worked so hard for the GPT-5 release and now discussions about the model are side by side with discussions about their badly-done graphs.

I don’t believe they intentionally fucked up the graphs, but it is nonetheless funny to see how much of an impact that has had. Talk about bad luck…

  • mepiethree 3 hours ago

    They all got $1.5 million today so I’m not too worried about the poor workers.

  • CamperBob2 2 hours ago

    Everybody including the employee who put those graphs into the slide deck just got $1.5M just for showing up at work. So there's not a lot of room for sympathy.

  • alfalfasprout 3 hours ago

    I've been using GPT-5 heavily today. It's genuinely very underwhelming. Sonnet 4 seems to outperform it in every real-world task I use it with.

    Lots of hype from Sam Altman and nothing to really show for it.

mrcwinn 2 hours ago

Let's entertain a completely imagined, made up thought experiment.

Imagine a revolutionary technology comes out that has the potential to increase quality of life, longevity and health, productivity and the standard of living, or lead to never before seen economic prosperity, discover new science, explain things about the universe, or simply give lonely people a positive outlet.

Miraculously, this technology is free to use, available to anyone with an internet connection.

But there was one catch: during its release, an error was made on a chart.

Where should this community focus its attention?

  • throwawayoldie 29 minutes ago

    We're not talking about said hypothetical technology. We're talking about LLMs.

  • datadrivenangel 2 hours ago

    There is a correlation between good communication and good outcomes. This is bad communication from the people that could maybe get us good outcomes.

  • nice_byte 2 hours ago

    When such technology comes out, we'll find out.

  • moody__ 2 hours ago

    After all of this hype this is the best they can do? This is the forefront company (arguable) of the forefront tech and no one can review slides before being shipped out? I think the reason why this has resonated with people is that it gives a "vibe" of not giving a shit, they'll ship whatever next slop generator they want and they expect people to gladly lap it up. Either that or they're using their own dog food and the result is this mess. Do the stats even matter anymore? Is that what they're banking on?

  • ekianjo 2 hours ago

    > But there was one catch: during its release, an error was made on a chart.

    that should be a tell that other things may be rigged to look better than they are