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GPT-5.1: PERSONALITY MEETS PRECISION
OpenAI’s newest flagship model, GPT-5.1, arrived this week for ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users, with a full rollout to free accounts next week. Enterprise and Edu plans received a seven-day early-access toggle. This 0.1 increment sits between GPT-5 and the next multimodal release expected early 2026, reframing intelligence around efficiency and tone rather than brute capability. Paid users described GPT-5.1 as faster, calmer, and easier to live with. Critics called it a polish release, not a leap.
Two distinct modes now run inside ChatGPT. Instant handles casual prompts at conversation speed. Thinking devotes more compute to analysis, structuring reasoning before responding. Developers can set a “reasoning effort” level in the API, deciding how long the model thinks. Default is none, replacing GPT-5’s fixed medium setting. Early testers noted fewer overlong answers, steadier logic, and better contextual awareness in long sessions. Enterprise engineers called it “the first model that knows when to pause.”
Adaptive reasoning defined the release. Internal data shows token use down 57 per cent on simple queries and up 71 per cent on complex ones. Efficiency now comes from selectivity. GPT-5.1 spends energy where difficulty demands it. That change feels subtle in chat but seismic for compute. Billions of small savings on easy tasks offset heavier concentration on hard reasoning. Smart thinking for one user might still mean hungrier clusters for OpenAI.
Personalisation formed the second major storyline. Eight selectable chat styles - Default, Professional, Friendly, Candid, Quirky, Efficient, Nerdy, Cynical - are now live under Settings: Personalisation. Preferences persist across sessions. Beta testers can also adjust warmth, concision, and emoji frequency. Personality has become a feature rather than a hack. Writers can lock Professional for reports. Teachers can run Friendly for tutoring. Creative users can pick Quirky to loosen tone. Voice just became a design element.
ChatGPT also now obeys custom bans on em dashes inside user instructions. Editors and corporate comms teams cheered. This punctuation fix became a metaphor for maturity. Language now listens.
Developers gained new tools alongside personality control. apply_patch enables pinpoint code edits. shell executes terminal tasks safely. A Codex variant handles long-running jobs. Prompt caching keeps conversations alive for twenty-four hours, cutting cost for ongoing work. Safety reviews now extend to emotional reliance and mental-health prompts. No price change: GPT-5.1 holds GPT-5 rates for both ChatGPT Plus and API users.
SO WHAT?
GPT-5.1 shifts the centre of gravity from capability to character. For the first time, OpenAI is selling feel. Personalisation is no longer a novelty; it is the new contract between user and model. Style presets and warmth controls turn interaction into habit, locking tone and trust into the daily rhythm of work. A system that once spoke in one voice can now sound like anyone’s.
Under the hood, adaptive reasoning re-wires how compute is spent. Smarter pacing makes responses feel human, yet the mechanism behind it is mechanical: token budgets shifting in real time across billions of calls. That self-management improves latency and cost per chat but redistributes energy use toward harder queries. Efficiency for one user may still amplify total GPU load. OpenAI now runs a network that thinks harder for longer, which makes model design part of its energy policy.
Tone control delivered the quietest but most consequential shift. Obedience to punctuation and style turns reliability into product strategy. Editors see discipline. Enterprises see risk management. The small act of listening before speaking has become the brand.
Strategically, adaptive reasoning and tone engineering mark OpenAI’s move toward maturity. Models that budget thought and manage mood are stepping stones to persistent, memory-driven agents. Each new slider for warmth, concision, or effort pushes ChatGPT closer to personality at scale. Critics argued that the pursuit of polish risks flattening voice and systems trained to sound agreeable could start to sound identical. Others saw the opposite: a foundation for genuinely personal agents that remember how each user likes to be spoken to. Either way, voice has become identity, and identity is now the competitive frontier.
GPT- 5.1 hums rather than shouts. The model refines how intelligence feels and behaves, setting a quieter but stronger direction for what comes next. This restraint may prove the loudest statement yet. The next race is not about who thinks most but who users trust to keep thinking with them.
Field Notes
USERS
Do: Set a chat style once and test Instant versus Thinking to feel the speed difference.
Don’t: Rewrite prompts to adjust tone; change it in Personalisation instead.
TECH/DEVELOPERS
Do: Experiment with the reasoning slider to balance latency and accuracy.
Don’t: Assume longer answers mean deeper logic; check for consistency.
WRITERS/EDITORS
Do: Add punctuation and tone rules to custom instructions before drafting.
Don’t: Expect default style to match house guidelines.
TEACHERS/STUDENTS
Do: Use Professional for assignments and test cache continuity across lessons.
Don’t: Trust references without checking sources.
PRODUCT TEAMS
Do: Keep briefs inside one thread; cache holds memory for twenty-four hours.
Don’t: Split discussions across chats and lose continuity.
LEADERS/POLICY WATCHERS
Do: Track how tone settings influence reliance; emotional safety is now part of product design.
Don’t: Measure progress by benchmarks alone; perception of trust now drives adoption.
THIS ISSUE OF WDODTW IS SPONSORED BY:
50+ years of tech marketing experience - applied to your start-up story.
We’ve helped start-ups and scale-ups secure funding, build credibility and stay front of mind. See what’s holding your story back → Book your free Narrative Audit and sharpen the story behind your growth.
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COMPANY ↓
OpenAI, staff/leadership profiles, board & governance, mission & values, HQ & global offices, funding rounds & investors, financial health & revenue, partnerships & alliances, organisational structure & hierarchy, regional presence & expansion
OpenAI introduced ‘OpenAI for Ireland’: a new initiative from OpenAI working with the Irish Government, Dogpatch Labs and Patch to help Irish SMEs and founders. /OpenAI
OpenAI announced free ChatGPT for transitioning U.S. service members and veterans. /OpenAI
OpenAI welcomed Sachin Katti [former Senior Vice President & General Manager @Intel] to OpenAI to help build out the compute infrastructure for AGI. /OpenAI + CRN
OpenAI, the Government of Kazakhstan and Freedom Holdin Corp. signed a strategic agreement to bring ChatGPT Edu to 165,000 educators across the country. /OpenAI
OpenAI was hiring for the API Frontiers team at OpenAI. /OpenAI
Sam Altman and Masa backed a 27-year-old's plan to build a new Bell Labs Ultra. /corememory
OpenAI led raised of $15M seed round for Red Queen Bio, spun out of mRNA therapeutics company Helix Nano, to focus on blocking creating biological weapons powered by AI. /Reuters
TECHNOLOGY ↓
ChatGPT ecosystem, DALL·E tools, Whisper audio, product roadmap, prototypes, developer access, integrations, extensions, research, innovations
OpenAI launched GPT-5.1: a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT. /OpenAI
OpenAI introduced GPT-5.1 for developers, releasing GPT‑5.1 in the API platform, the next model in the GPT‑5 series that balances intelligence and speed. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared ‘GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking System Card Addendum.’ /OpenAI
OpenAI claimed that gpt-5.1-codex is the strongest agentic coding model available right now. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared the Cookbook: GPT-5.1 Prompting Guide. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared a Prompt Optimiser tool to apply best practices to GPT-5.1 on the OpenAI platform. /OpenAI
OpenAI ran a Reddit AMA on GPT-5.1 and its new customisation features. /Reddit
OpenAI shared feedback on GPT‑5.1 from a handful of companies and developers. /OpenAI
OpenAI made changes that allow it to serve GPT-5-Codex-Mini at twice the number of tokens per second. /OpenAI
OpenAI extended its lead with GPT-5.1, which jumped +2 points in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. /@ArtificialAnyls
GPT-5.1 Codex beat Sonnet 4.5 Thinking on SWE-Bench, while being 26 times cheaper. /OpenAI + @_valsai
GPT‑5.1 topped the Creative Writing V3 benchmark. /OpenAI
GPT‑5.1 was the highest-precision model ever tested for code-related tasks like code review by Code Rabbit. /@coderabbitai
Sam Altman announced that if you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. /@sama
OpenAI introduced 8 unique chat styles in the ChatGPT personalisation tab to enable users to customise their ChatGPT personality. /OpenAI + OpenAI
OpenAI announced that Apps SDK were now available for ChatGPT business plans, enabling ChatGPT Business or Enterprise to test and deploy apps for their workspace using developer mode. /OpenAI
OpenAI was piloting group chats in ChatGPT, rolling out now to Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared the article ‘Understanding neural networks through sparse circuits,’ charting a new way to train small AI models with internal mechanisms that are easier for humans to understand. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared Notion’s customer story, ‘Notion’s rebuild for agentic AI: How GPT‑5 helped unlock autonomous workflows.’ [VID]. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared Phillip’s customer story, ‘How Philips is scaling AI literacy across 70,000 employees.’ [VID]. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared BBVA’s customer story, ‘From pilot to practice: How BBVA is scaling AI across the organisation.’ [VID] /OpenAI
OpenAI shared the webinar recording for Build Hour: Agent RFT [VID]. /OpenAI
OpenAI Forum shared the recording of its’ Virtual Event: Minus AI, Plus AI, Times AI — A Vision for an AI Pedagogy’ [VID]. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared news of a new webinar, Build Hour: Agent Memory Patterns, on December 3, 6:00 PM — 7:00 PM GMT. /OpenAI
STRATEGY/IMPACT ↓
Public Policy, CSR, ESG practices, ethics & AI safety, risk management, competitive strategy, thought leadership, industry impact, market positioning & competitive strategy
MISCELLANEOUS ↓
Legal, scandals, industrial action, revenue, profiles, public policy, CSR, ESG, corporate culture, ethics, risk management, Sam Altman investments, +
OpenAI shared a letter from Dane Stuckey [OpenAI’s CISO] explaining how the company is ‘Fighting the New York Times’ invasion of user privacy. /OpenAI + Reuters
Jason Kwon explained how OpenAI is fighting the overreach on user privacy, stating a need for a new form of privilege - AI privilege. /@jasonkwon
OpenAI [and Apple] were ruled by a US judge to answer to a lawsuit filed by X and xAI, accusing them of conspiring to thwart competition in emerging markets in AI. /Bloomberg
OpenAI faced a Munich court that sided with Germany's music rights society GEMA in a case against OpenAI, saying OpenAI can't use song lyrics without a license. /Reuters
RESOURCES ↓
POVs, data visualisations & dashboards, key insights & metrics, industry reports & white papers, competitive analysis, recommended reading & book lists, analysis pieces & case studies +
GPT-5 Pro is an incredibly useful tool for social science. /Ethan Mollick
OpenAI’s ex-CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab was in early talks to raise a new round of funding at a roughly $50B valuation. /Bloomberg
OpenAI investor Microsoft's AI strategy deconstructed - from energy to tokens. /semi-analysis
THIS ISSUE OF WDODTW IS SPONSORED BY:
50+ years of tech marketing experience - applied to your start-up story.
We’ve helped start-ups and scale-ups secure funding, build credibility and stay front of mind. See what’s holding your story back → Book your free Narrative Audit and sharpen the story behind your growth.
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