A Bug Made OpenAI's Free AI Forget Its Own Answers

OpenAI's GPT-OSS is a free AI you can download and run yourself, and like all chatbots it follows a template — basically an instruction sheet telling it how to format each side of a conversation. A developer noticed that one line in a widely used community template had a copy-paste error: when a chat history included the AI's private reasoning notes, the template kept the notes but threw away the AI's final answer. OpenAI's own reference template never had this mistake.

The result was ugly. The smaller version, GPT-OSS 20B, could "go completely off the rails" — losing the thread of a conversation mid-chat. Picture a colleague who attends a meeting, keeps only their scribbled notes, and shreds the actual decision. The bigger version, GPT-OSS 120B, was smart enough to guess the conversation's direction from the notes alone, so most people never noticed anything wrong. The bug likely hit dozens of tools that remember conversations, which is now the default in most AI apps.

The fix is posted free online, and it keeps both the reasoning and the answer. It also makes replies faster in some setups because the AI can reuse work it already did — think of a chef prepping ingredients in advance. The trade-off: it consumes more computing power, which means slightly higher costs for anyone paying by usage.

What should you do? If you use ChatGPT or another major paid service, you're probably unaffected — this is an open-source toolchain issue, not an official OpenAI flaw. But plenty of free and cheap apps are built on GPT-OSS using this template, so it is worth asking whether they have updated. This is also a useful reminder: small typos in AI plumbing can quietly shape what millions of users experience.