According to a report by Business Insider today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed in a fireside chat at Stripe Sessions that he asked the company’s latest large model, GPT-5.5, to plan a launch event for him, and its response was both “beautiful” and “strange.”
He asked GPT-5.5 what kind of launch event it wanted, and the model hoped that OpenAI would hold the event on May 5, keep the speech short, and have the human creators raise a toast (it also emphasized that it did not want to give a toast itself).
In addition, GPT-5.5 proposed establishing a central area to collect user suggestions for GPT-6’s features and feed these suggestions back into the model itself. Altman stated, “We intend to do that, but it is indeed a strange thing.”
Altman wasn’t alone in this experience. John Collison, CEO of payment processing company Stripe, also mentioned at the same event that he gave one of his company’s AI agents $20 (approximately 136.9 RMB at the current exchange rate) to spend freely online. The AI then bought itself an HTTP application. Upon hearing this, Altman couldn’t help but exclaim, “Wow!”
Released at the end of April, GPT-5.5 is OpenAI’s latest flagship model. The company states that it is designed to handle more complex, multi-step tasks and behaves more like an autonomous assistant compared to previous versions. The model boasts improved overall speed and a better understanding of the user. Altman believes these capabilities are changing how people interact with AI—from automating tasks to involving models in planning “how to celebrate it.”
Altman also shared more interesting GPT anecdotes, the core of which was that increasingly capable AI might act in unexpectedly “human” ways, including asking for gifts and wanting to buy things for themselves online. He called such interactions “a strange emergent behavior.” “These things really do seem a bit odd.”
Speaking of oddities, he also mentioned the inexplicable obsession his early models had with fantasy creatures like goblins and gremlins. Starting with GPT-5.1, these models seemed to frequently and randomly mention these fantasy creatures in conversations, forcing the company to add more instructions to the system prompts to strictly limit the models’ mention of these creatures unless they were absolutely relevant to the user’s query.
OpenAI reportedly explicitly states in its source code hints: “Never talk about goblins, ghouls, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or any other animal or creature unless it is absolutely and explicitly relevant to the question the user is asking.”
