Op-Ed: GPT 5.5 – Hype, obviously, but redefining the AI environment as well

OpenAI says it is building a ‘superapp’ that combines ChatGPT, a coding tool, online search, and AI agent capabilities – Copyright AFP SEBASTIEN BOZON

If you read OpenAI’s blurb on GPT 5.5, “Introducing GPT 5.5,” you’ll notice a very upbeat description of the new platform, but with an interesting addition in plain sight.

OpenAI is clearly trying to address the many issues arising from prior platforms and consumer grumblings on multiple levels. This is critical because so far, the responses to AI problems have been largely useless and anything but reassuring.

This is important. AI hype has been seriously getting on people’s nerves, notably the people paying for it. Most professional IT commentators are far less than impressed with the constant sales pitch, particularly when it includes glossing over major issues like security and just getting things done properly.

There are problems. There are risks. We’re also talking about big outlays for businesses and significant challenges in core functions for just about everybody.

The market isn’t helping itself with absurd situations like its idiotic dismissal of Software as a Service, aka SaaS, assuming coding somehow is a thing of the past, when it’s absolutely integral to every step forward with AI. Future coding for AI is likely to look very different and evolve into something totally new overnight. It will need to be hyper-efficient, perhaps totally rewritten to manage basic operations. You will need SaaS like you will need to breathe.

What’s desperately needed is clarity, and above all, credible responses to criticisms. This clarity needs to be at the consumer, tech, and business levels, and structured to address all of the issues.

This is why “Introducing GPT 5.5” needs to be seen as an actual response. OpenAI have gone to some lengths to try to fit all of these minefields into one press release, and they’ve managed to keep it interesting.

I won’t rehash the blurb. Just read it and watch the priorities emerge. Suffice to say that it’s still a sales pitch, but at least it’s believably ballpark for addressing this daily-growing encyclopaedia of situations. They’ve even managed to address heuristics, the thankless and much-bitched-about frontier of vibe coding and inferences for prompts, etc., into the mix.  

Now we can get to the environment. AI is creating new environments for itself and the world at incredible speed. It’s easy to forget that most of the current issues weren’t even beginning to be mainstream issues a year ago. This level of response from a major player like OpenAI is new and indicates a level of market awareness not particularly noticeable a year ago, too.

So what is this new environment? It’s a patchy, buggy, vague businessscape, a consumer wading pool with sudden deep ends, and more. It’s an arena for half-baked employment issues. It’s also a self-inflicted problem for Big AI.

The adoption and deployment of AI are looking pretty chaotic. It’s nebulous in areas where it needs to be well-defined. It’s looking like an ADHD version of the early internet.

What’s needed is much more clarity, and plenty of it, preferably in LEGO form. Digitization required systemic training of everybody on Earth, workplace practices and protocols definition, and above all, personal-level familiarity with the real-world applications.

OpenAI doesn’t actually say in so many words that they’ve at long last declared war on slop. They’re just constantly talking about refining all the areas that generate slop.  To be fair, there’s a clear drive to quality control and oversighted functionality.

Can somebody tell me why any of these countless AI dysfunctions are tolerated at all by anyone? Nobody needs expensive chatty evasive unreliable automated idiots. You can get verbose excuse factories at any meeting for free. This is business.

Almost unnoticed in “Introducing GPT 5.5” is a very welcome nod and acknowledgement of the super high-value scientific AI. This is the true Golden Goose of AI. How they fitted it into the blurb, I don’t know, but it desperately needed to be there. This level of operations is bread and butter for top level AI, and cutesy chatbots are nothing by comparison.

That’s good news for the high end of AI applications. The public face of AI is somewhere between Ronald McDonald and Freddy Krueger.  

The overall look is terrible. “It’s great, it’s wonderful, it’s dangerous, and we may or may not know which at any given moment” isn’t good enough. The pity of it is that this look is pretty accurate.

This bizarre look creates instant sales resistance as well as some pretty justifiable fear and loathing. It’s totally counterproductive.  

Some questions:

How much of future AI development looks at objectives like modelled values for users?

Can you put an ROI on a given AI task before you start it?

What are the opt-out and standalone choices for people who don’t want third-party involvement in high-value IP work?

Is there such a thing as an Off switch?

How do people pin down AI management and fixes into a demonstrable and quantifiable contract service cost? That’s not at all clear.

At what point does AI stop being an undefinable threat?

GPT 5.5 may well be great. It’s the business environment you need to talk about.