- Sam Altman says GPT-5.4 is his “favorite model to talk to” and a step forward for ChatGPT’s personality
- OpenAI admits the model still has three notable weaknesses, including design taste, real-world context, and task completion
- The comments suggest OpenAI is now focusing as much on how ChatGPT feels to use as how powerful it is
In a recent post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the new ChatGPT-5.4 as “my favorite model to talk to!” while also admitting that previous fifth-generation models hadn’t been perfect when it came to human interaction. “We have missed the mark on model personality for a while, so it feels extra good to be moving in the right direction,” he added.
His use of the phrase “for a while” appears to reference the debate over ChatGPT’s personality, which has dogged OpenAI ever since it retired the popular ChatGPT-4o model in November last year. Many users felt 4o had a much better personality than the later fifth-generation GPT models.
Campaigns to bring back the 4o model have been running since it was taken away on February 13 2026, despite access to the fifth-generation GPT models being widely available.
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OpenAI has recently released new GPT-5.3 Instant and GPT-5.4 Thinking models, and it’s this 5.4 model that Altman believes has the best personality, as well as being great at coding.
GPT-5.4 is great at coding, knowledge work, computer use, etc, and it’s nice to see how much people are enjoying it.But it’s also my favorite model to talk to! We have missed the mark on model personality for awhile, so it feels extra good to be moving in the right direction.March 7, 2026
The best model in the world
However, in a separate post on X, Altman also admitted that GPT-5.4 still has some weaknesses, and said these were things OpenAI would be fixing. His reply came in response to a post by Matt Shumer, who is clearly a fan of GPT-5.4, saying that 5.4 “is the best model in the world, by far,” before adding, “It’s so good that it’s the first model that makes the ‘which model should I use?’ conversation feel almost over.”
Shumer did go on to list three weaknesses, though. Specifically:
- “Frontend taste is far behind Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Why is this so hard to fix? @OpenAI once you fix this, there’s literally no reason for me to use any other model. Please please please do it!
- It can still miss obvious real-world context. For example, I had it plan an itinerary for a trip. At first glance, it looked perfect, but it failed to take into account that it chose locations that would be mobbed by spring breakers, so I had to re-run the prompt from scratch with more context.
- When testing it inside OpenClaw, it kept stopping short before finishing tasks. I’m assuming this will be fixed quickly, but it’s still worth noting.”
In response, Altman posted enthusiastically: “We will be able to fix these three things!”
You may be wondering what “frontend taste” means here. We believe Shumer is referring to the AI’s sense of style and aesthetics when generating user interfaces for things like web apps, so this relates to coding.
While he praises GPT-5.4’s coding ability, it sounds like the user interfaces it produces are less polished, modern, or visually appealing than those generated by rivals like Claude or Gemini.
The other two criticisms seem more straightforward, although if you’re wondering what OpenClaw is, it’s an open-source system designed to automate AI workloads across large numbers of Macs, particularly clusters of Mac minis. It can be used to combine multiple Macs for running or training AI models.
The popularity of OpenClaw is being blamed for shortages in the Mac mini supply chain.
More than anything, the exchange hints that OpenAI is now focused on how ChatGPT feels to use, not just how well it performs on paper. That’s significant, because many of the complaints about the fifth-generation GPT models weren’t really about capability, but about personality — with people criticizing them for sounding robotic, flat, or overly sycophantic.
Altman’s posts suggest OpenAI knows that getting the tone right is no longer a side issue, but a key part of making a GPT that people actually want to talk to.
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