ChatGPT Just Got Less Preachy. Here's What That Means for Your Business.
Plus: The AI energy bill nobody warned you about, and a 4-step trick to turn any spreadsheet into a real dashboard.
My son has a rule about homework helpers.
“Dad, I just want the answer. Not a lecture.”
Fair. I get it.
Turns out, millions of ChatGPT users have been saying the exact same thing. For months, OpenAI’s AI would answer a perfectly harmless question with a preamble that felt like a disappointed librarian clearing her throat. Unnecessary warnings. Hedges. Disclaimers. The AI version of “well, before I answer that...”
This week, OpenAI did something about it.
Word of the Day: Hallucination
Hallucination is when an AI confidently makes something up and presents it as fact.
Think of it like a very enthusiastic intern who doesn’t know something, but refuses to admit it, so they just... invent an answer. With total confidence.
For your business, hallucinations are dangerous. A hallucinating AI might give you wrong legal citations, invent statistics, or describe a product feature that doesn’t exist. The good news? This week brought real progress on reducing them.
The Big News: ChatGPT Got a Major Personality Upgrade
OpenAI rolled out a new version of the model that powers ChatGPT, called GPT-5.3 Instant.
The headline: it’s 26.8% less likely to make things up on web-based questions. And it’s faster, about 25% quicker than before.
But the change most people will actually notice? Less preaching.
The old ChatGPT would sometimes refuse a perfectly reasonable question or bury the answer under three paragraphs of “please consult a professional.” GPT-5.3 Instant is built to match the tone and depth of what you actually asked. Ask a simple question, get a simple answer. Ask a complex one, get depth.
What this means for you: If you’ve been frustrated by ChatGPT’s overly cautious personality, try it again this week. Customer service drafts, proposal letters, quick research questions. The responses should feel more direct and useful.
The Rivalry Nobody Expected: Dario Amodei vs. Sam Altman
If you follow AI at all, you know Anthropic (the company that makes Claude) and OpenAI are the two heavyweights.
This week, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei sent an internal memo that leaked publicly. He called OpenAI’s new deal with the Pentagon “maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater.” He accused OpenAI’s Sam Altman of “gaslighting” and said the behavior was “a pattern I’ve seen often.”
Hot stuff.
Why does this matter to you? These two companies are fighting over what AI should be allowed to do and who gets to make those calls. The government, the military, and businesses are all caught in the middle. Watch this space.
For the record: both companies make great products. I use them both. But competition is good for all of us, and right now, the gloves are off.
A Tool You Already Have, Now More Powerful: NotebookLM
Google’s NotebookLM just added Slide Decks and Infographics.
Here’s why this matters, if you haven’t used NotebookLM yet: you upload your own documents (contracts, reports, research, meeting notes), and the AI reads them, understands them, and answers questions about them. It only works with what you give it, which makes it more trustworthy than general AI for business-specific questions.
Now it can also turn all that material into presentation slides or visual infographics automatically.
Practical use case: Upload your Q1 reports and customer feedback, then ask it to create a slide deck summarizing the key points. Takes about 3 minutes to set up. Would have taken you 2 hours manually.
NotebookLM is free to use at notebooklm.google.com.
The Tip of the Week: Turn Any Spreadsheet Into a Dashboard in 4 Steps
This one’s practical. Really practical.
But first, a quick setup note, because this tripped me up when I first looked at it.
Claude in Excel is not a separate browser tab. It’s not a website you open alongside your spreadsheet. It’s an add-in that lives inside Excel as a sidebar panel. Once it’s installed, you open your spreadsheet, and Claude can already see everything in that file. No copying, no pasting, no switching windows. You just type in the sidebar and Claude reads the data right in front of it.
To get set up:
Go to the Microsoft Marketplace and search “Claude by Anthropic for Excel”
Click “Get it now” and install it
Open Excel, activate the add-in from your Home ribbon, and sign in with your Claude account
That’s it. Claude is now inside Excel.
Here’s the 4-step dashboard process once you’re set up:
Step 1. Understand what you have. In the Claude sidebar, type: “Look at this workbook. Tell me what this data is, what each column represents, and flag any problems with the structure or formatting.”
Step 2. Clean it up. Type: “Fix every issue you identified. Remove junk rows. Format numbers for human readability and create proper tables with clear headers.”
Step 3. Build the dashboard. Type: “Create a ‘Dashboard’ tab. Identify 3 to 5 useful metrics and build a summary table for each. Rank the entries. Highlight top performers in green and bottom performers in red.”
Step 4. Add charts. Type: “Add 2 or 3 charts to the Dashboard tab that tell the story of this data. Pick chart types that make the most sense. Make them clean and labeled.”
Claude highlights every cell it touches and explains what it changed. You see exactly what happened before you keep it.
One honest caveat: In complex spreadsheets, Claude occasionally gets confused by circular references and formula errors. It will try to fix them, but check its work before you send anything to a client. It’s a powerful tool. It’s not perfect.
Cost: Claude in Excel is included with Claude Pro at $20/month. If you’re already paying for Claude, you have access right now.
This is Vibe Coding at its simplest. You describe what you want. The AI builds it. No formulas. No pivot table headaches.
The Story Nobody’s Talking About: AI Is Raising Your Electric Bill
I don’t want to write this one.
But I have to.
Here’s something that should stop you cold: wholesale electricity prices in some U.S. cities have jumped as much as 267% since 2020. And more than 70% of the areas with the biggest price increases are within 50 miles of a major data center.
By 2035, data centers are expected to consume 9% of all U.S. electricity. That’s the biggest surge in energy demand since air conditioning spread across America in the 1960s.
The Trump administration responded this week with what they’re calling the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” getting major AI companies to commit to funding their own power infrastructure upgrades.
What does this mean for your business? Probably not much right now. But if you’re in commercial real estate, utilities, or planning a major operations expansion, watch where data centers are being built. The energy ripple effect is real.
Quick Hits Worth Knowing
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. It’s a faster, cheaper AI model for businesses doing high-volume tasks like content moderation or data extraction. 8x cheaper than Google’s top model, with significantly better performance than the previous version.
OpenAI is building its own version of GitHub. GitHub is where developers store their code. OpenAI is reportedly building a competitor, which would put it in direct conflict with Microsoft, its largest investor. The AI industry is getting weirder by the week.
Supreme Court says AI art can’t be copyrighted. If you use AI to generate an image, you cannot own the copyright to it. A human has to be meaningfully involved in the creative process for copyright to attach. This is important if your marketing uses AI-generated visuals.
The Bottom Line
Here’s what this week tells me.
AI is getting better, faster, cheaper, and more useful. The preachy ChatGPT we’ve complained about is starting to grow up. The tools are becoming more like actual business partners and less like cautious interns.
But the stakes are also getting bigger. The energy costs are real. The rivalry between the major AI companies will shape what these tools can do. The government is getting involved.
You don’t need to track all of it. You just need to keep moving.
Try GPT-5.3 Instant this week. Test the 4-step spreadsheet trick with your next set of data. Check out NotebookLM if you haven’t.
Small steps. Real results. That’s how this works.
We’ll get there. Together.
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.