Overview

• Altman said a wave of praise for OpenAI’s Codex on the r/Claudecode subreddit felt like bots or fakery even though he knows Codex adoption is genuinely rising.
• He cited overlapping causes including real users adopting LLM-style language, tightly correlated online crowds, hype-cycle whiplash, platform engagement and monetization incentives, suspected astroturfing, and some bots.
• Data points referenced in coverage underscore the scale: Imperva reported that most 2024 web traffic was non‑human, and X’s Grok estimated hundreds of millions of bots on the platform.
• Press coverage revived talk that OpenAI may be exploring a social product, but no product has been announced and such plans remain unconfirmed.
• Context from research and peers adds weight: a University of Amsterdam experiment found bot-only networks form echo chambers, and figures like Paul Graham and Chris Best say AI-like or low-quality automated content is increasingly common.