New York —

Sam Altman, the artificial intelligence hype master, is in damage-control mode.

OpenAI’s latest version of its vaunted ChatGPT bot was supposed to be “PhD-level” smart. It was supposed to be the next great leap forward for a company that investors have poured billions of dollars into.

Instead, ChatGPT got a flatter, more terse personality that can’t reliably answer basic questions. The resulting public mockery has forced the company to make sweaty apologies while standing by its highfalutin claims about the bot’s capabilities.

In short: It’s a dud.

The misstep on the model, called GPT-5, is notable for a couple of reasons.

1. It highlighted the many existing shortcomings of generative AI that critics were quick to seize on (more on that in a moment, because they were q

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