On Thursday, OpenAI announced GPT-5.3-Codex, a new coding model that is 25% faster than its predecessor, along with other impressive benchmarks.
But what really gets attention is another claim Sam Altman’s company has made about its development. GPT-5.3-Codex was probably the first model to “contribute to its own creation,” and the team was “astounded” by the results.
Is the Singularity just around the corner? Is this a sign of long-awaited recursive self-improvement, the point at which machines will finally be able to continually rewrite their own code to become better beings?
Not completely. In less sensational terms, OpenAI rephrases the role of AI as being used to “accelerate its own development.” According to the blog post, “the Codex team used the initial version to debug their own training, manage their own deployments, and diagnose test results and assessments.”
In other words, GPT-5.3.-Codex helped human programmers with some of their tasks. While this may be impressive, it is not a sign that humanity will soon become obsolete.
Nevertheless, the imagination of AI boosters went into overdrive. Reactions to posts on the r/singularity subreddit about the news were filled with a mixture of catastrophic hype, catastrophic hype, and a fair amount of gallows humor. “I want everyone to remember what a great middle manager I was before machines,” one user wrote. That sentiment was also felt by X. “Oh my god, here we go!” tweeted another user who runs an AI newsletter.
Taken together, this is a sign that the discourse around AI remains dominated by science fiction concepts and rhetoric, and distorted by hype. AI companies have been guilty of fanning the flames from time to time. Last month, Anthropic’s head of Claude code, Boris Charney, claimed that “nearly” 100% of the company’s code is now generated by AI using proprietary models. However, what this actually looks like behind the scenes remains unclear. And we are still far from the idea that AI models will build new models completely autonomously.
In any case, humans are not alone. Altman, who has been on an emotional roller coaster of late with the release of the new Codex, joined the pile with a sob story about how good and depressed his coding tools were.
“Last week I created an app using Codex and had a lot of fun,” Altman tweeted. “Then I started asking for ideas for new features, and at least some were better than I thought. I felt a little useless and sad.” Who said the “vibe” in “vibe coding” had to be good?
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