Sam Altman

Factual · AI capabilities

“They now hallucinate a little bit.”

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, interviewed · 11 September 2025 · Transcript: Sam Altman Interview on Tucker Carlson Show (Singju Post)

Current AI models now hallucinate only a little bit.

Mixed Partly true and partly false in roughly equal measure.

Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.

What would count as true or false

True: as of 2025-09-11, benchmark and independent evaluation data show leading AI models (e.g. GPT-5) hallucinating at low rates in typical use, e.g. low single-digit percentages on standard factuality tests. Mostly true: hallucination rates are low in common settings but noticeably higher in some notable ones. Mixed: rates are low on some widely used benchmarks but substantial on others, such as open-ended factual questions without retrieval. Mostly false: rates fell but remain substantial on many standard measures, so 'a little bit' understates them, or the claim generalises from one model or setting. False: evaluations show current models still hallucinate often across common tasks.

Evidence

1. ChatGPT-5 is more trustworthy than before according to new tests, but this big rival wins the crown for spreading AI nonsense Yahoo Tech (Future syndication) · 12 August 2025

   “According to Vectara, GPT-5 has a grounded hallucination rate of 1.4%, compared to 1.8% for GPT-4, and 1.69% for GPT-4 turbo and 4o mini, with 1.49% for GPT-4o.”

2. ChatGPT-5 is more trustworthy than before according to new tests, but this big rival wins the crown for spreading AI nonsense Yahoo Tech (Future syndication) · 12 August 2025

   “While hallucination rates are dropping amongst almost all LLMs, it's still surprisingly common, and one of the main reasons that we can't trust AI to perform a task without human supervision.”

3. Why language models hallucinate OpenAI · 5 September 2025 Own record

   “Hallucinations remain a fundamental challenge for all large language models, but we are working hard to further reduce them.”

4. SimpleQA AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai) · 30 October 2026

   “the August 2025 GPT-5 system card reported gpt-5-thinking at 55% accuracy with a 40% hallucination rate on SimpleQA”

Reasoning

E1 reports that, according to Vectara, GPT-5's grounded hallucination rate was 1.4%, a low single-digit figure. E4, however, cites the August 2025 GPT-5 system card as giving gpt-5-thinking a 40% hallucination rate on SimpleQA. E2, an independent article, describes hallucination as still surprisingly common even though rates are falling. Rates are low on one widely used benchmark and substantial on open-ended factual QA, which matches the criteria's definition of mixed.

Cite this claim

Sam Altman, “Current AI models now hallucinate only a little bit.” (said 11 September 2025). Verdict: mixed. Reliability API, claim c_4e1607e0cf00, method 0.1.0+c876030c. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_4e1607e0cf00