People who use ChatGPT every day have been noticing a shift, the models keep getting better at logic, but the writing can feel harder to read. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has now acknowledged that focus shift, saying the company pushed technical capability and let polish slip.
The issue surfaced during a recent town hall after Ben Hilac, the CTO of Raindrop, told Altman that GPT-4.5 felt like the first version that was genuinely strong at writing. He said GPT-5’s prose can be unwieldy, and that the model’s performance feels uneven, with big gains in coding paired with a dip in readability.
Altman agreed with the critique and described it as a mistake tied to prioritization. If GPT-5 writing quality has felt tougher to skim lately, OpenAI is signaling it wasn’t accidental.
It chose coding over polish
OpenAI has been operating under a resource squeeze, which pushed it to pick priorities. In this cycle, it concentrated on making the model better at reasoning, coding, and engineering-style work, even if that meant other strengths lagged. That trade shows up in the day-to-day experience, especially when you ask for longer explanations.
GPT-5 can feel more capable in technical tasks, but less natural in everyday writing. You may find yourself doing more restructuring, trimming, and rewriting to get something you’d actually send or publish.
One model, not two
Altman doesn’t want users choosing between a model that codes well and a model that writes well. The long-term bet is that intelligence transfers across skills, and that a general-purpose system should handle building and communicating in the same session.
OpenAI’s version of good writing is about coherent thinking and practical communication, not literary flair. Even if the output is an app or a chunk of code, the model still has to guide you through decisions, explain what it did, and ask follow-up questions in language that stays readable.
What to watch in GPT 5.x
Altman pointed to GPT 5.x as the place where writing should improve without giving back the technical advances OpenAI has been chasing. The company wants a model that reads more cleanly and still performs when you’re building something complex.
For now, the practical move is to treat GPT-5 as a strong logic tool that may need extra editing for prose-heavy work, and watch for 5.x updates that explicitly call out writing improvements.