Forget AGI—Sam Altman celebrates ChatGPT finally following em dash formatting rules

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman celebrated a breakthrough where ChatGPT finally follows custom instructions to avoid using em dashes, punctuation marks that have become a telltale sign of AI-generated text. However, this "small win" highlights a bigger problem: if the world's most valuable AI company has struggled for years to control basic punctuation, artificial general intelligence may be much further away than industry leaders claim. The achievement reveals that AI language models work through statistical probability rather than true understanding, making reliable instruction-following an ongoing challenge.