Sam Altman asked a new model powering ChatGPT what it wants at its party.
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Speaking during a fireside chat at Stripe Sessions, the OpenAI CEO described asking GPT-5.5 what it would want for a debut party.
The AI model responded with “a beautiful set of things” it wanted for “the flow of the party,” he said, including holding the event on May 5, keeping speeches short, and having its human creators deliver a toast (the AI emphasized it did not want to give a toast itself).
GPT-5.5 also proposed setting up a central place to gather suggestions for GPT 5.6 — and feeding those suggestions back into the model.
“We’re going to do it,” Altman said. “But it was a strange thing.”
He wasn’t alone. John Collison, the CEO of the payment processing company, Stripe, said he gave his company’s internal agent $20 to spend on anything it wanted on the internet. He said it bought itself an HTTP design from the e-commerce design platform, Gumroad.
“Wow,” Altman said in response.
GPT-5.5, released in late April, is OpenAI’s latest flagship model. The company says it’s designed to handle more complex, multi-step tasks and act more like an autonomous assistant than earlier versions. It’s also marketed as generally faster and better at maintaining knowledge about the user.
Those capabilities are already changing how people interact with AI, Altman suggested — from automating work to, in this case, asking a model how it would like to be celebrated.
Altman’s party anecdote came after a broader discussion about how increasingly capable AI systems can behave in ways that feel unexpectedly human, including asking for gifts and wanting to buy new tools online. He described such interactions as a “weird emergent behavior.”
“There are these things that feel a little strange,” he said.
Speaking of strange, OpenAI and Sam Altman have recently jumped into the internet meme conversation about their previous models’ obsession with goblins and gremlins. Starting in GPT-5.1, the AI apparently loved to randomly talk about fantastical creatures, leading the company to add multiple lines of coding instructions, directing the system not to mention them unless absolutely relevant to the user’s prompt.
“Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query,” the source code reads.
