Sam Altman is no stranger to accusations of lying — but according to one of OpenAI’s biggest haters, he has a tick when he does it on camera.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is no stranger to accusations of lying — but according to one of the company’s most vociferous critics, he has a tick when he does it on camera.
In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, AI researcher and skeptic Gary Marcus put forth a compelling theory: that viewers can tell when Altman is lying or stretching the truth by the way he looks up and away from the camera when being filmed.
«When he says things he can’t actually deliver, or that aren’t the full truth, he often looks up at the sky», Marcus proffered.
Filmed and published back in February, the video evidence of Altman’s obfuscation sees the CEO talking a very big game about GPT-5, OpenAI’s then-forthcoming large language model (LLM) that at that point had been eagerly anticipated for nearly two years.
The video shared by Marcus dates back to when Altman was visiting Japan in February in his second attempt to sell AI software to that country’s government.
In the clip, the CEO boasted at length about the incredible capabilities of GPT-5.
As we now know, those capabilities have very much not materialized, with all reports and anecdotes suggesting that in the nearly two-and-a-half years between the releases of GPT-4 and GPT-5, OpenAI somehow managed to launch a product that left a lot to be desired, with users arguing that it was inferior to its predecessors, like GPT-4o.
