As it prepares to reach 1 billion active users by 2025the company OpenAI celebrated the first two years of the ChatGPT version that started the public conversation about Artificial Intelligence, the supposed great technological revolution of the century. However, a mystery surrounds the most popular chatbot in the world… Why can’t you say the name “David Mayer”?
It all started on November 30 when businesswoman and investor Justine Moore posted a chance discovery on her X account: despite multiple attempts, she was unable to get ChatGPT to write texts in which the name David Mayer appears.
What started as an innocent observation, It quickly became a challenge on social networks and on the popular Reddit forum. Some asked him to say the first name first, then the last name, and finally the combination, without success. Others changed their username to David Mayer, so the system would call them by name. It didn’t work either.
Thus, for a week the strategies became more sophisticated and increasingly cryptic, from trying to deceive the system with riddles worthy of the Greek sphinx to Oedipus to creating mathematical tricks linked to figures and statistics whose answers were given by David Mayer. Nothing worked.
It does not seem like a programming error or an involuntary bug in the system but rather an explicit decision.
David Mayer is not alone
On Reddit, user @jopeljoona found five more names that the chatbot can’t mention: Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber y Guido Scorza. What is happening? At first it does not seem to be a programming error or an involuntary bug in the system but rather an explicit decision… could it be a personal revenge of an OpenAI engineer or a joke?
The most feasible explanation has little conspiracy and a lot of rationality: Briand Hood and Jonathan Turley, for example, are on trial with OpenAI because ChatGPT wrongly claimed in the past that they were criminals. And in the case of Guido Scorza, he is an Italian lawyer who works on privacy issues and may have asked to be excluded from the platform’s responses.
But who the hell is David Mayer? Nobody knows! Or at least, no one managed to find an explanation indicating the reason for this real blacklist. But, for now, it is not possible to make the chatbot talk about it.
ChatGPT: a global success
Beyond the limitations, ChatGPT does not stop growing. In an interview with the Financial Times, its financial director Sarah Friar assured that they are evaluating Include advertisements within your results to improve your finances. While investors remain willing to continue supporting this technology, the amounts are so high that OpenAI cannot resist alternative forms of financing.
The company continues to lead the profound change that the Generative Artificial Intelligencewhich was adopted by companies and people around the world.
In fact, they are expected to have 1 billion users next year, about the same number as Meta’s Messenger service. However, the mystery remains, what is really happening with David Mayer?