Sam Altman asked what the new model that powers ChatGPT wants from the party.
In a fireside chat at Stripe Sessions, OpenAI’s CEO explained that he asked GPT-5.5 what it wanted from its debut party.
He said the AI model responded with a “beautiful series of things” that he wanted for “the flow of the party,” including holding the event on May 5, shortening the speech, and having the human creator lead the toast. (He stressed that the AI had no intention of leading the toast himself.)
GPT-5.5 also proposes setting up a central location to collect suggestions for GPT 5.6 and feeding those suggestions back into the model.
“We’re going to do it,” Altman said. “But it was weird.”
He wasn’t alone. John Collison, CEO of payment processing company Stripe, said he gave his company’s in-house agents $20 to spend on anything they wanted on the Internet. He said his company purchased the HTTP design from e-commerce design platform Gumroad.
“Amazing,” Altman replied.
GPT-5.5, released in late April, is OpenAI’s latest flagship model. The company says it is designed to handle more complex, multi-step tasks and behave more like an autonomous assistant than previous versions. It is also generally touted to be faster and better at maintaining knowledge about users.
These capabilities are already changing the way people interact with AI, Altman suggested, from automating tasks to, in this case, asking the model how it would be praised.
Altman’s party anecdote comes after widespread discussion about how increasingly capable AI systems may behave in unexpectedly human-like ways, such as begging for gifts or wanting to buy new tools online. He described such interactions as “strange outbursts.”
“It can feel a little weird sometimes,” he said.
Speaking of weird, OpenAI and Sam Altman recently jumped into an internet meme conversation about their obsession with previous models of goblins and gremlins. Since GPT-5.1, the AI seemed to like randomly talking about fantastical creatures, so the company added a multi-line coding instruction that told the system not to mention them unless absolutely relevant to the user’s prompt.
The source code says, “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless completely and clearly related to the user’s query.”