Every week in the AI Playground section of our Tech Memo newsletter, we feature folks trying an AI tool, or sometimes I test stuff out myself.
This week, we hear from Business Insider's star AI reporter Stephen Council. He's been using OpenAI's Codex tool to build software stuff without using code. OpenAI merged Codex with ChatGPT this week, so this is good timing.
I adore the copy-paste tool. Every day, it saves me from misspelling names, misquoting sources, wasting time on rewriting… I could go on and on. It's quick and easy and basically perfect.
This week, Codex made it better. I've long wanted a version of copy-paste that lets me store multiple strings of text at once, so I can copy something new without losing what I'd copied before. There are clipboard managers for this online, but they often cost money, or add a pop-up and additional clicks — exactly the slowdowns I don't want.
I gave OpenAI's tool a 190-word prompt, and voila! Five minutes and 26 seconds later, Codex handed me my app.
Now, I have 9 different copy-paste slots on my work MacBook. Command-c and command-v work as normal, that's slot one. But now I can keep additional names, quotes, and links at the tip of my tongue: cmd-c-2 copies text for cmd-v-2, cmd-c-3 ties to cmd-v-3, and on and on. The app hangs out on my menu bar, so if I want to see what each slot is storing, it's all a click away.
Very satisfying. It's exactly the niche and nerdy case that vibe coding is good for.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, worth $1.1 trillion, is wealthier than the next four richest people combined.
Musk lost more than Warren Buffett's entire net worth on Monday.
Elon Musk is now so wealthy that he's making a mockery of the rich list.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was worth $1.08 trillion as of Monday's market close, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The next-richest person in the world, Alphabet cofounder Larry Page, was less than a third as wealthy with a net worth of $299 billion.
In fact, Musk is richer than the next four people in the billionaire rankings: Page, his cofounder Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who were together worth $1.06 trillion as of Monday's close.
The sheer scale of Musk's fortune means shifts in others' fortunes now pale in comparison. For example, Page, Brin, and Bezos each lost more than $10 billion in Monday's tech rout.
Those losses look paltry compared to Musk's $152 billion wealth decline on the same day, fueled by a 16% plunge in SpaceX's stock just days after its blockbuster IPO.
Put differently, Musk lost in one day a sum that exceeds Warren Buffett's entire fortune. The 95-year-old investor and Berkshire Hathaway chairman ranked 10th on Bloomberg's list with a $146 billion net worth at Monday's close.
Given Musk has a $700 billion-plus lead over anyone else, he simply looks out of place on a mere billionaires list. He's started a trillionaire club with only one member.
The wealth gap between Musk and his rich-list peers has only grown truly stark in the past few months. In fact, Ellison briefly leapfrogged him in September to become the world's richest person despite being worth less than $400 billion.
The key reason for Musk's net worth skyrocketing has been SpaceX's soaring valuation, which has boosted his fortune by $456 billion in less than six months, per Bloomberg's list.
That wealth gain has catapulted Musk into a league of his own and given him a seemingly insurmountable lead over the rest of the billionaire pack.
The yawning divide reflects Musk's large stakes in two companies valued at over $1 trillion: Tesla and SpaceX. It's hard to see anyone catching up to him, barring a massive crash in either company's stock price, given nobody else has two horses of that size in the wealth race.
OpenAI wrote that it first notice the presence of goblins and gremlins with GPT-5.1.
OpenAI
OpenAI included a line in Codex's instructions restricting references to goblins, gremlins, trolls, and ogres.
The company explained in a blog post that mythical creatures have crept into answers since GPT-5.1.
The goblin references were incentivized while building ChatGPT's "Nerdy" personality, OpenAI wrote.
OpenAI has been in "goblin mode" for months.
On Monday, one X user pointed out an unusual line in Codex's personality guide. The instructions tell Codex to have a "vivid inner life," a "good ear" — and to get out of fairytale land.
"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.
The sentence appears four times in the code.
Two days later, OpenAI posted a blog post titled: "Where the goblins came from." The mythical creatures had been growing in prominence since the November launch of GPT 5.1, the company wrote.
References to "goblin" and "gremlin" jumped between GPT-5 Thinking and GPT-5.1 Thinking.
OpenAI
The culprit seems to be the "Nerdy" personality option for ChatGPT. The personality's training incentivized references to mythical creatures, OpenAI wrote.
OpenAI retired the "Nerdy" personality in March, but GPT-5.5 was trained before it noticed the issue. The company noticed it especially in its AI coding agent. "Codex is, after all, quite nerdy," it wrote.
The goblin moment is a "powerful example of how reward signals can shape model behavior in unexpected ways," it wrote.
How OpenAI's goblin code turned into a meme
In the prior days before the line of code was spotted, some users posted screenshots of their conversations with GPT 5.5, including references to these mythical creatures.
"Why is gpt5.5 so obsessed with goblins," asked one user on X, who posted screenshots showing the AI recommending a particular type of camera equipment "if you want filthy neon sparkle goblin mode." Another example showed the AI referencing "goblin bandwidth" or giving "an even shorter goblin version" of its answer.
Repo Prompt founder Eric Provencher posted on X that GPT 5.5 said, "I'll keep babysitting it rather than leave a little perf gremlin running unattended." An OpenAI engineer responded: "I thought we fixed this sorry."
The AI evaluation website Arena.ai also found an increase in GPT 5.5's usage of the words goblin, gremlin, and troll. The increase was especially noticeable when not using high-thinking mode, Arena found.
It's true. Here's a plot of GPT models and their usage of "goblin", "gremlin", "troll", etc over time. There's no anti-gremlin system instruction on our side, we get to see GPT-5.5 run free. https://t.co/UbuHqpyvw7pic.twitter.com/Z8F6mTtJSS
Since the line was spotted, OpenAI's goblin instruction has spun out into a meme. X users posted screenshots of their conversations, prompting about goblins and gremlins.
Many usersonline referenced the term "goblin mode." Defined as "a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy," the term was Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year in 2022.
OpenAI also got in on the jokes. ChatGPT included the line in its bio on X. Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux posted the line with the shortening "If you know, you know."
ChatGPT added the goblin instruction to its bio on X.
Screenshot via X
Citrini Research shook the market in February with a Substack post about the future of the economy with AI. The research outfit had a more negative outlook on the goblin saga, calling OpenAI's response "insane."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in, first with a meme about asking for "extra goblins" in GPT-6. Then he wrote that Codex was having a ChatGPT moment, before correcting himself.
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