What's odd is that the chatbot is so confident about the wrong answer it's giving; one of the biggest weakness of today's AI assistants. However, a new study from OpenAI argues these failures aren’t random, but a direct result of how models are trained and evaluated. Newer models aren’t immune(Image credit: ChatGPT AI generated image)Interestingly, OpenAI’s paper found that reasoning-focused models like o3 and o4-mini actually hallucinate more often than some older models. That could mean your future chatbot might hedge more often, less “here’s the answer” and more “here’s what I think, but I’m not certain.” It may feel slower, but it could dramatically reduce harmful errors. And for developers, this is a sign that it's time to rethink how we measure success so that future AI assistants can admit what they don’t know instead of getting things completely wrong.