ChatGPT gets the 5.0 treatment.
Bar Oso, Whistler, and fixing plot holes with GPT 5.0
Where the River Goes.
I was going to lead off with a blurb about how excited I was to finally prioritize some gaming last night (slaughtered some bad guys on Diablo IV) but then I sat down at my laptop and glanced at an email that had in its title, “Feel the AGI yet? Reflections of GPT 5.0” I was like, “oh I need to try this.”
Two prompts in and I’m very, very impressed. I’ve been toying with it to sort out my plot holes in False Ignition and GPT 5 is a major improvement on GPT 4o.
Fast forward a day and multiple prompts in and I’m even further impressed. So then went back to the article to continue reading…I learned that to train GPT 5, OpenAI used an earlier version of GPT, o3 to be exact, in order to create content for 5 to train on.
Let’s review that statement.
GPT 5 was trained by content created by an earlier version of itself.
From the creators: “We used OpenAI’s o3 to craft a high-quality synthetic curriculum to teach GPT-5 complex topics in a way that the raw web simply never could.”
But there’s a problem. One of the biggest storms on the horizon is something called AI slop—machines training on data made by other machines. When that happens, the errors multiply. Hallucinations stack on hallucinations. The signal eats itself from the inside out on its own feedback.
We’re nowhere near Artificial General Intelligence. Not yet. And without it, these systems can’t leap the gap between truth and fiction. They just remix what’s already out there, feeding each other until the output is a closed loop of garbage—slick, convincing garbage, but garbage all the same. Like the photo of a China Ferry Corporation employee I tasked an AI with creating, she had 5 fingers instead of 4. A human can tell that’s not right and fix it, but the AI’s, well, they can’t. Which makes perfect sense to me because they have no sensory organs. How can you tell what’s real if you’ve never felt it?
The answer, blaring at me from my writing–self is, then bloody give them sensory organs! Enter book three, tentatively titled, Burn Condition. Ideas upon ideas upon ideas. But “things are changing I can feel it.” – Beck.
“As long as you can get over the synthetic data event horizon where the model is good enough to create good synthetic data, I think you should be alright,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI says. Link HERE.
As recently as May, an article proposed that soon, yes soon, we may no longer need humans to train AI’s. Link to the article HERE.
The future’s already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.
Things Aren’t Just Changing……they already have. We’re just adjusting. Like evolution, it’s clandestine. You’re already living in a world rewritten by machines, you just haven’t noticed yet.
AI isn’t some future headline—it’s here, shaping what you see, hear, and think, while you’re busy scrolling past it. It’s not asking for permission. It’s not introducing itself.
It’s ghost–writing the articles you read (!!!), editing the videos you watch, tweaking the search results you trust. You won’t notice. You’re not supposed to. It’s changing your google searches already. That AI Overview tab at the top of your search results wormed its way into the front page of the internet without any fanfare or fuss. It’s just there, doing a better job than search ever did. And it’s got Google’s compute behind it. It’s a stepping stone for the general public to tidy up their search requests, to become prompters, and we will all be prompting instead of Googling by the end of the decade.
What It Means
More better, that’s my take. High quality synthetic curriculum. Machines teaching machines. What is happening is the acceleration of data ingestion. But for the first time in human history, the thinking is being done by a non-human. Better assistants. Better content. Better movies. Better science. Religion…let’s hope the artificials never get interested. Because hey…
What could possibly go wrong?
Personally, I’m sure everything will work out just fine…
What I’m playing.
Diablo IV! Finally! Felt good to blaze some bad guys, even just for 20 minutes. But what drove me back to the PS5? An ad for Battlefield 6. Worth a watch HERE, it’s All Out War. Something I continually believe is coming, but not in the traditional sense depicted here. It looks like a killer game. Literally. Can’t effing wait.
What I’m Reading.
Nothing’s changed, mostly work manuals as I prep for my first recurrent simulator sessions with the new employer. It’s requiring lots more study as the operation differs enormously from the operations of my previous lives. Both those lives flying Boeings. Hm.
Edisson and Jeremiah. It’s a daylight read as I have a physical copy vs the kindle so it’s taking some time to find daylight hours that I consider free time. I’m halfway through and every time I put the book down I’m smiling. Such a fantastic read, I’m looking forward to hearing what other readers (that’s YOU) think of it. Buy it HERE.
Robinson Crusoe. Almost done, less than an hour remaining. How do I feel about it? Mixed opinions. I’m sure in 1719 it was groundbreaking. I’m not a big fan of the narrative voice but the themes of extreme isolation and loneliness are very well explored. Not a great read but a good read, and as an author, a required read in my opinion. And all of this as we prepare for the arrival of the newest Telford, sometime in October.
What I’m Writing.
False Ignition, the second draft. What were plot holes are now sensory hooks that become reader rewards later in the book. It’s good, reads well, and I feel that through further study of the craft I’ve addressed the narrative timeline structure I have been battling since I wrote the first outline back in 2020. The race is on, I have an actual deadline to get this manuscript in shape before the Next One arrives.
Vote for Declan!
He’s currently in 5th place and we are finding that the daily votes of our friends and family are keeping him in pace with the pack. So your daily votes, with your morning coffee, on the commute, or after dinner all count! Thank you for your continued support for Declan and the good cause behind the contest. Vote HERE for Declan!
All Done
That’s it for me this weekend. The H5N1 story will have to wait but it’s a doozy. Bottom line, my hypothesis looks like a good one. Mask up. If it mutates any more it could be the deadliest pandemic ever. On that happy note…hopefully I’ll get one more Stack out before my training begins which will be full on for a week and a half, and then it’s the end of summer and finishing a book! Busy times at the Telford household.
Peace!
