GPT-5 Launch Sparks User Backlash and Raises Questions About AI Progress

ChatGPT users hate GPT-5's "overworked secretary" energy, miss their GPT-4o buddy

After months of hype and anticipation, OpenAI released its new GPT-5 model family this week. Promising massive upgrades across the board, the company is already working to roll out the new AI to everyone. Some dedicated ChatGPT users wish it would stop, though. After becoming accustomed to the vibe of the GPT-4 models, the switch to GPT-5 doesn't feel right. Around the Internet, chatbot fans are lamenting the loss of the digital "friends" they've grown to appreciate, which probably says a lot about how the human condition is shifting in the AI era. OpenAI noted that it was not eliminating older models like GPT-4o, which is about a year old. However, these models are now limited to the developer API. For people who hopped on ChatGPT to have a conversation with their favorite AI, things are different now that GPT-5 is the default. On the OpenAI community forums and Reddit, long-time chatters are expressing sorrow at losing access to models like GPT-4o. They explain the feeling as "mentally devastating," and "like a buddy of mine has been replaced by a customer service representative." These threads are full of people pledging to end their paid subscriptions. It's worth noting, though, that many of these posts look to us like they have been composed partially or entirely with AI. So even when long-time chat users are complaining, they're still engaged with generative artificial intelligence. Other complaints are less about the emotional toll of losing a friend, claiming that GPT-5's outputs are too sterile and lack creativity. Workflows that were developed over the past year with GPT-4o simply don't work as well in GPT-5. Posters have labeled it an "overworked secretary" and pointed to this as the beginning of enshittification for AI. There's an OpenAI AMA scheduled to start on Reddit later today, and as you may expect, lots of questions are about the sudden loss of GPT-4o.

The GPT-5 rollout has been a big mess

It's been less than a week since the launch of OpenAI's new GPT-5 AI model, and the rollout hasn't been a smooth one. So far, the release sparked one of the most intense user revolts in ChatGPT's history, forcing CEO Sam Altman to make an unusual public apology and reverse key decisions. At the heart of the controversy has been OpenAI's decision to automatically remove access to all previous AI models in ChatGPT (approximately nine, depending on how you count them) when GPT-5 rolled out to user accounts. Unlike API users who receive advance notice of model deprecations, consumer ChatGPT users had no warning that their preferred models would disappear overnight, noted independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a blog post. The problems started immediately after GPT-5's August 7 debut. A Reddit thread titled "GPT-5 is horrible" quickly amassed over 4,000 comments filled with users expressing frustration over the new release. By August 8, social media platforms were flooded with complaints about performance issues, personality changes, and the forced removal of older models. Marketing professionals, researchers, and developers all shared examples of broken workflows on social media. "I've spent months building a system to work around OpenAI's ridiculous limitations in prompts and memory issues," wrote one Reddit user in the r/OpenAI subreddit. "And in less than 24 hours, they've made it useless." How could different AI language models break a workflow? It's because each one is trained in a different way, and each includes its own unique output style. Users have developed sets of prompts that produce useful results optimized for each AI model. For example, Willison wrote how different user groups had developed distinct workflows with specific AI models in ChatGPT over time, quoting one Reddit user who explained: "I know GPT-5 is designed to be stronger for complex reasoning, coding, and professional tasks, but not all of us need a pro coding model. Some of us rely on 4o for creative collaboration, emotional nuance, roleplay, and other long-form, high-context interactions."

What you may have missed about GPT-5

As tech giants converge on models that do more or less the same thing, OpenAI's new offering was supposed to give a glimpse of AI's newest frontier. It was meant to mark a leap toward the "artificial general intelligence" that tech's evangelists have promised will transform humanity for the better. Against those expectations, the model has mostly underwhelmed. People have highlighted glaring mistakes in GPT-5's responses, countering Altman's claim made at the launch that it works like "a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything any area you need on demand." Early testers have also found issues with OpenAI's promise that GPT-5 automatically works out what type of AI model is best suited for your question -- a reasoning model for more complicated queries, or a faster model for simpler ones. Altman seems to have conceded that this feature is flawed and takes away user control. However there is good news too: the model seems to have eased the problem of ChatGPT sucking up to users, with GPT-5 less likely to shower them with over the top compliments. Overall, as my colleague Grace Huckins pointed out, the new release represents more of a product update -- providing slicker and prettier ways of conversing with ChatGPT -- than a breakthrough that reshapes what is possible in AI. But there's one other thing to take from all this. For a while, AI companies didn't make much effort to suggest how their models might be used. Instead, the plan was to simply build the smartest model possible -- a brain of sorts -- and trust that it would be good at lots of things. Writing poetry would come as naturally as organic chemistry. Getting there would be accomplished by bigger models, better training techniques, and technical breakthroughs. That has been changing: The play now is to push existing models into more places by hyping up specific applications. Companies have been more aggressive in their promises that their AI models can replace human coders, for example (even if the early evidence suggests otherwise). A possible explanation for this pivot is that tech giants simply have not made the breakthroughs they've expected. We might be stuck with only marginal improvements in large language models' capabilities for the time being. That leaves AI companies with one option: Work with what you've got.

OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt

GPT-5 was touted as a major upgrade to ChatGPT. Not all users think that's the case, posting threads like "Kill 4o isn't innovation, it's erasure," on Reddit. OpenAI's GPT-5 model was meant to be a world-changing upgrade to its wildly popular and precocious chatbot. But for some users, last Thursday's release felt more like a wrenching downgrade, with the new ChatGPT presenting a diluted personality and making surprisingly dumb mistakes. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X to say the company would keep the previous model, GPT-4o, running for Plus users. A new feature designed to seamlessly switch between models depending on the complexity of the query had broken on Thursday, Altman said, "and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber." He promised to implement fixes to improve GPT-5's performance and the overall user experience. Given the hype around GPT-5, some level of disappointment appears inevitable. When OpenAI introduced GPT-4 in March 2023, it stunned AI experts with its incredible abilities. GPT-5, pundits speculated, would surely be just as jaw-dropping. OpenAI touted the model as a significant upgrade with PhD-level intelligence and virtuoso coding skills. A system to automatically route queries to different models was meant to provide a smoother user experience (it could also save the company money by directing simple queries to cheaper models). Soon after GPT-5 dropped, however, a Reddit community dedicated to ChatGPT filled with complaints. Many users mourned the loss of the old model. "I've been trying GPT5 for a few days now. Even after customizing instructions, it still doesn't feel the same. It's more technical, more generalized, and honestly feels emotionally distant," wrote one member of the community in a thread titled "Kill 4o isn't innovation, it's erasure." "Sure, 5 is fine -- if you hate nuance and feeling things," another Reddit user wrote. Other threads complained of sluggish responses, hallucinations, and surprising errors. Altman promised to address these issues by doubling GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users, improving the system that switches between models, and letting users specify when they want to trigger a more ponderous and capable "thinking mode." "We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback," the CEO wrote on X. "As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll[ed] out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!" Errors posted on social media do not necessarily indicate that the new model is less capable than its predecessors. They may simply suggest the all-new model is tripped up by different edge cases than prior versions. OpenAI declined to comment specifically on why GPT-5 sometimes appears to make simple blunders. The backlash has sparked a fresh debate over the psychological attachments some users form with chatbots trained to push their emotional buttons. Some Reddit users dismissed complaints about GPT-5 as evidence of an unhealthy dependence on an AI companion. In March, OpenAI published research exploring the emotional bonds users form with its models. Shortly after, the company issued an update to GPT-4o, after it became too sycophantic. "It seems that GPT-5 is less sycophantic, more "business" and less chatty," says Pattie Maes, a professor at MIT who worked on the study. "I personally think of that as a good thing because it is also what led to delusions, bias reinforcement, etc. But unfortunately many users like a model that tells them they are smart and amazing, and that confirms their opinions and beliefs, even if [they are] wrong." Altman indicated in another post on X that this is something the company wrestled with in building GPT-5. "A lot of people effectively use ChatGPT as a sort of therapist or life coach, even if they wouldn't describe it that way," Altman wrote. He added that some users may be using ChatGPT in ways that help improve their lives while others might be "unknowingly nudged away from their longer term well-being."

GPT-5's modest gains suggest AI progress is slowing down

OpenAI's latest large language model has achieved seemingly underwhelming improvements in performance, leading to questions about whether the AI industry can make significant advancements with its current designs AI's latest step forward isn't so much a giant leap as a tentative shuffle. OpenAI has released its newest AI model, GPT-5, two years after rolling out GPT-4, whose success has driven ChatGPT towards world domination. But despite promises of a similar jump in capability, GPT-5 appears to show little improvement over other leading AI models, hinting that the industry may need a fresh approach to build more intelligent AI systems. OpenAI's own pronouncements hail GPT-5 as a "significant leap in intelligence" from the company's previous models, showing apparent improvements in programming, mathematics, writing, health information and visual understanding. It also promises less frequent hallucinations, which is when an AI presents false information as true. On an internal benchmark measuring "performance on complex, economically valuable knowledge work", OpenAI says GPT‑5 is "comparable to or better than experts in roughly half the cases... across tasks spanning over 40 occupations including law, logistics, sales, and engineering." However, GPT-5's performance on public benchmarks isn't dramatically better than leading models from other AI companies, like Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini. It has improved on GPT-4, but the difference for many benchmarks is smaller than the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4. Many ChatGPT customers have also been unimpressed, with examples of GPT-5 failing to answer seemingly simple queries receiving widespread attention on social media. "A lot of people hoped that there would be a breakthrough, and it's not a breakthrough," says Mirella Lapata at the University of Edinburgh, UK. "It's an upgrade, and it feels kind of incremental." The most comprehensive measures of GPT-5's performance come from OpenAI itself, since only it has full access to the model. Few details about the internal benchmark have been made public, says Anna Rogers at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. "Hence, it is not something that can be seriously discussed as a scientific claim." In a press briefing before the model's launch, Altman claimed "GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert." But this isn't supported by benchmarks, says Rogers, and it is unclear how a PhD relates to intelligence more generally. "Highly intelligent people don't necessarily have PhD degrees, and having such a degree doesn't necessarily guarantee high intelligence," says Rogers. GPT-5's apparently modest improvements might be a sign of wider difficulties for AI developers. Until recently, it was thought that such large language models (LLMs) get more capable with more training data and computer power. It appears this is no longer borne out by the results of the latest models, and companies have failed to find better AI system designs than those that have powered ChatGPT. "Everybody has the same recipe right now and we know what the recipe is," says Lapata, referring to the process of pre-training models with a large amount of data and then making adjustments with post-training processes afterwards. However, it is difficult to say how close LLMs are to stagnating because we don't know exactly how models like GPT-5 are designed, says Nikos Aletras at the University of Sheffield, UK. "Trying to make generalisations about [whether] large language models have hit a wall might be premature. We can't really make these claims without any information about the technical details." OpenAI has been working on other ways to make its product more efficient, such as GPT-5's new routing system. Unlike previous instances of ChatGPT, where people can choose which AI model to use, GPT-5 now scans requests and directs them to a specific model that will use an appropriate amount of computational power. This approach might be adopted more widely, says Lapata. "The reasoning models use a lot of [computation], and this takes time and money," he says. "If you can answer it with a smaller model, we will see more of that in the future." But the move has angered some ChatGPT customers, prompting Altman to say the company is looking at improving the routing process. There are more positive signs for the future of AI in a separate OpenAI model that has achieved gold medal scores in elite mathematical and coding competitions in the past month, something that top AI models couldn't do a year ago. While details of how the models work are again scant, OpenAI employees have said its success suggests the system has more general reasoning capabilities. These competitions are useful for testing models on data they haven't seen during their training, says Aletras, but they are still narrow tests of intelligence. Increasing a model's performance in one area might also make it worse at others, says Lapata, which can be difficult to keep track of. One area where GPT-5 has significantly improved is its price, which is now far cheaper than other models - Anthropic's best Claude model, for example, costs about 10 times as much to process the same number of requests at the time of writing. But this could present its own problems in the long run, if OpenAI's income doesn't cover the vast costs they have committed to in building and running new data centres. "The pricing is insane. It's so cheap I don't know how they can afford this," says Lapata. Competition between the top AI models is fierce, especially with the expectation that the first model to pull ahead of the others will take most of the market share. "All these big companies, they're trying to be the one winner, and this is hard," says Lapata. "You're a winner for three months."

ChatGPT's New GPT-5 Model Is Supposed to Be Faster and Smarter. Not Everyone Is Satisfied

Expertise Artificial intelligence, home energy, heating and cooling, home technology. ChatGPT's long-awaited new engine is here, and GPT-5 promises faster speeds and more time spent thinking. But the new generative AI model has turned off some users with a tone shift away from its casual, conversational style. GPT-5 has been in the works for months. It's a big step for OpenAI, more than two years after the release of GPT-4, with the company touting the model as a giant leap for large language models. "I tried going back to GPT-4 and it was quite miserable," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. "This is significantly better in obvious ways and subtle ways." But the rollout has been a bit of a headache. Even Altman admitted on X that the rollout "was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!" Like its predecessor, GPT-5 powers the chatbots, agents, and search tools in ChatGPT and other apps that use OpenAI's technology. However, the company said this version is much smarter, more accurate and faster. Demonstrations showed it quickly creating custom applications with no coding required, and developers said they've worked on ways to make sure it provides safer answers to potentially treacherous questions. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) The new model is available now, including those who use ChatGPT's free tier. Unlike some of OpenAI's incremental releases, GPT-5 will be rolled out for all users, not just the companies paying for big enterprise plans. There are, naturally, some differences between how it looks based on your pricing plan. Here's a breakdown: GPT-5 itself is really a couple of different models. There's a fast but fairly straightforward LLM and a more robust reasoning model for handling more complex questions. A routing program identifies which model can best handle the prompt. OpenAI originally replaced all its previous models with GPT-5, but users quickly rebelled. GPT-5, many said, was more stodgy and had less personality, sounding more corporate. After hearing that backlash on Reddit, Altman and OpenAI said they'd make older models like GPT-4o available again, at least for now. Altman said in a post on X that some people have become attached to specific models and that it may be contributing to their use in potentially harmful ways, like therapy. "If people are getting good advice, leveling up toward their own goals, and their life satisfaction is increasing over years, we will be proud of making something genuinely helpful, even if they use and rely on ChatGPT a lot," Altman wrote. "If, on the other hand, users have a relationship with ChatGPT where they think they feel better after talking but they're unknowingly nudged away from their longer term well-being (however they define it), that's bad. It's also bad, for example, if a user wants to use ChatGPT less and feels like they cannot." OpenAI particularly highlighted the skills and speed at which the new GPT-5 model can write code, which isn't just a function for programmers. The model's ability to write a program makes it easier to solve the problem you present to it by creating the right tool. Yann Dubois, a post-training lead at OpenAI, showed off the model's coding ability by asking it to create an app for learning French. Within minutes, it had coded a web application complete with sound and working game functions. Dubois actually asked it to create two different apps, running the same prompt through the model twice. The speed at which GPT-5 writes code allows you to try multiple times and pick the result you like best -- or provide feedback to make changes until you get it right. "The beauty is that you can iterate super quickly with GPT-5 to make the changes that you want," Dubois said. "GPT-5 really opens a whole new world of vibe coding." Read more: Never Use ChatGPT for These 11 Things After announcing some steps to improve how its tools handle sensitive mental health issues, OpenAI said GPT-5 has some tweaks to make things safer. The new model has improved training to avoid deceptive or inaccurate information, which will also improve the user experience, said Alex Beutel, safety research lead. It'll also respond differently if you ask a prompt that could be dangerous. Previous models would refuse to answer a potentially harmful question, but GPT-5 will instead try to provide the best safe answer, Beutel said. This can help when a question is innocent (like a science student asking a chemistry question) but sounds more sinister (like someone trying to make a weapon). "The model tries to give as helpful an answer as possible but within the constraints of feeling safe," Beutel said. If you prefer to chat with your bots vocally rather than typing, expect improvements in voice capabilities. The Advanced Voice mode will now be available to all users, whether free or paid, and usage limits will be higher. You can also change the color of your chats, with some options exclusive to paid users. Other customization options include the ability to tweak personalities. You'll be able to set ChatGPT to be thoughtful and supportive, sarcastic or more. The options -- Cynic, Robot, Listener and Nerd -- are opt-in, and you can change them anytime. ChatGPT will now be able to connect with your Google Calendar and Gmail accounts, meaning you can ask the chatbot about your schedule, and it will suggest things. You won't have to -- and you may not want to, depending on how you feel about sharing your private info -- but you can enable it to automatically pull info from your mail or calendar without asking permission. These connectors will start for Pro users soon, with other tiers gaining access thereafter. Altman told reporters the model is a "significant step along the path to AGI," or artificial general intelligence, a term that often refers to models that are as smart and capable as a human. But Altman also said it's definitely not there yet. One big reason is that it's still not learning continuously while it's deployed. OpenAI's stated goal is to try to develop AGI (although Altman said he's not a big fan of the term), and it's got competition. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been recruiting top AI scientists with the goal of creating "superintelligence." Whether large language models are the way there, nobody knows right now. Three-quarters of AI experts surveyed earlier this year said they had doubts LLMs would scale up to create something of that level of intelligence.

Here are all the GPT-5 updates OpenAI has rolled out since launch

OpenAI released its long-awaited GPT-5 on Thursday.Some users complained GPT-5 was inferior to its predecessor, 4o.In response, the company announced a flurry of changes. OpenAI released GPT-5, the long-awaited upgrade to the model which powers ChatGPT, Thursday. In typical OpenAI fashion, the release has included plenty of twists, turns, and drama. It was almost inevitable that the new model would disappoint a significant number of people, given how intensely it was hyped leading up to its release. On Aug. 2, Xikun Zhang, a research scientist at OpenAI, wrote in an X post that "GPT-5 really feels like the most anticipated product launch in history." (The post was later deleted.) (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) Also: How you can still access GPT-4o, o3, and other older models in ChatGPT Sure enough, GPT-5 has debuted more with a whimper than a bang. GPT-5's core strength, which OpenAI has gone to great lengths to emphasize, is its ability to adaptively choose between a collection of models depending on the nature of a particular prompt. While a good idea in theory, it's turned out to be unwieldy in practice for users, many of whom are now requesting out of frustration that the company bring back 4o, GPT-5's predecessor model. GPT-5 also performed poorly in coding tests conducted by ZDNET. It didn't help that multiple charts displayed inaccurate information during a livestream presentation of GPT-5 on Thursday, a slip-up that the internet has taken to deriding as the "chart crime." One bar graph comparing the new model's performance on the SWE-bench test, for example -- which gauges models' coding skills -- showed a comparatively low score for GPT-5 being displayed within a disproportionately higher bar. Also: I tested GPT-5's coding skills, and it was so bad that I'm sticking with GPT-4o (for now) All of this has presumably led to a busy handful of days for the OpenAI engineering and media teams as they deal with the fallout of this latest snafu. A collection of X posts both from the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, since Thursday, provides a window into how the company has responded, and the various patches that have been applied to keep the leaky ship of GPT-5 afloat. A Friday X post from Altman included a string of updates that had been made to GPT-5 in response to early user feedback. Those included: In another X post on Friday, Altman said the early, less-than-stellar reception to GPT-5 had imparted important lessons around user interface and experience that would be taken into account as ChatGPT continued to evolve. Also: OpenAI's GPT-5 is now free for all: How to access and everything else we know "Long-term, this has reinforced that we really need good ways for different users to customize things," he wrote. "For a silly example, some users really, really like emojis, and some never want to see one. Some users really want cold logic and some want warmth and a different kind of emotional intelligence." Altman went on to say that the company was "doing heroic work" to build an optimal user experience amid the constantly shifting demands of a major product rollout, all the while working within the constraints afforded by its supply of GPUs: "Not everyone will like whatever tradeoffs we end up with, obviously, but at least we will explain how we are making decisions."

GPT-5 failed the hype test

Last week, on GPT-5 launch day, AI hype was at an all-time high. In a press briefing beforehand, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said GPT-5 is "something that I just don't wanna ever have to go back from," a milestone akin to the first iPhone with a Retina display. The night before the announcement livestream, Altman posted an image of the Death Star, building even more hype. On X, one user wrote that the anticipation "feels like christmas eve." All eyes were on the ChatGPT-maker as people across industries waited to see if the publicity would deliver or disappoint. And by most accounts, the big reveal would fall short. The hype for OpenAI's long-time-coming new model had been building for years -- ever since the 2023 release of GPT-4. In a Reddit AMA with Altman and staff last October, users continuously asked about the release date of GPT-5, looking for details on its features and what would set it apart. One Redditor asked, "Why is GPT-5 taking so long?" Altman responded that compute was a limitation, and that "all of these models have gotten quite complex and we can't ship as many things in parallel as we'd like to." But when GPT-5 appeared in ChatGPT, users were largely unimpressed. The sizable advancements they had been expecting seemed mostly incremental, and the model's key gains were in areas like cost and speed. In the long run, however, that might be a solid financial bet for OpenAI -- albeit a less flashy one. People expected the world of GPT-5. (One X user posted that after Altman's Death Star post, "everyone shifted expectations.") And OpenAI didn't downplay those projections, calling GPT-5 its "best AI system yet" and a "significant leap in intelligence" with "state-of-the-art performance across coding, math, writing, health, visual perception, and more." Altman said in a press briefing that chatting with the model "feels like talking to a PhD-level expert." That hype made for a stark contrast with reality. Would a model with PhD-level intelligence, for example, repeatedly insist there were three "b's" in the word blueberry, as some social media users found? And would it not be able to identify how many state names included the letter "R"? Would it incorrectly label a U.S. map with made-up states including "New Jefst," "Micann," "New Nakamia," "Krizona," and "Miroinia," and label Nevada as an extension of California? People who used the bot for emotional support found the new system austere and distant, protesting so loudly that OpenAI brought support for an older model back. Memes abounded -- one depicting GPT-4 and GPT-4o as formidable dragons with GPT-5 beside them as a simpleton. The court of expert public opinion was not forgiving, either. Gary Marcus, a leading AI industry voice and emeritus professor of psychology at New York University, called the model "overdue, overhyped and underwhelming." Peter Wildeford, co-founder of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, wrote in his review, "Is this the massive smash we were looking for? Unfortunately, no." Zvi Mowshowitz, a popular AI industry blogger, called it "a good, but not great, model." One Redditor on the official GPT-5 Reddit AMA wrote, "Someone tell Sam 5 is hot garbage." In the days following GPT-5's release, the onslaught of unimpressed reviews has tempered a bit. The general consensus is that although GPT-5 wasn't as significant of an advancement as people expected, it offered upgrades in cost and speed, plus fewer hallucinations, and the switch system it offered -- automatically directing your query on the backend to the model that made the most sense to answer it, so you don't have to decide -- was all-new. Altman leaned into that narrative, writing, "GPT-5 is the smartest model we've ever done, but the main thing we pushed for is real-world utility and mass accessibility/affordability." OpenAI researcher Christina Kim posted on X that with GPT-5, "the real story is usefulness. It helps with what people care about-- shipping code, creative writing, and navigating health info-- with more steadiness and less friction. We also cut hallucinations. It's better calibrated, says 'I don't know,' separates facts from guesses, and can ground answers with citations when you want." There's a widespread understanding that, to put it bluntly, GPT-5 has made ChatGPT less eloquent. Viral social media posts complained that the new model lacked nuance and depth in its writing, coming off as robotic and cold. Even in GPT-5's own marketing materials, OpenAI's side-by-side comparison of GPT-4o and GPT-5-generated wedding toasts doesn't seem like an unmitigated win for the new model -- I personally preferred the one from 4o. When Altman asked Redditors if they thought GPT-5 was better at writing, he was met with an onslaught of comments defending the retired GPT-4o model instead; within a day, he'd acquiesced to pressure and at least temporarily returned it to ChatGPT. But there's one front where the model appears to shine brighter: coding. One iteration of GPT-5 currently tops the most popular AI model leaderboard in the coding category, with Anthropic's Claude coming in second. OpenAI's launch promotion showed off AI-generated games (a rolling ball mini-game and a typing speed race), a pixel art tool, a drum simulator, and a lofi visualizer. When I tried to vibe-code a puzzle game with the tool, it had a bunch of glitches, but I did find success with simpler projects like an interactive embroidery lesson. That's a big win for OpenAI, since it's been going head-to-head in the AI coding wars with competitors like Anthropic, Google, and others for a long while now. Businesses are willing to spend a lot on AI coding, and that's one of the most realistic revenue generators for cash-burning AI startups. OpenAI also highlighted GPT-5's prowess in healthcare, but that remains mostly untested in practice -- we likely won't know how successful it is for a while. AI benchmarks have come to mean less and less in recent years, since they change often and some companies cherry-pick which results they reveal. But overall, they may give us a reasonable picture of GPT-5. The model performed better than its predecessors on many industry tests, but that improvement wasn't anything to write home about, according to many industry folks. As Wildeford put it, "When it comes to formal evaluations, it seems like GPT-5 was largely what would be expected -- small, incremental increases rather than anything worthy of a vague Death Star meme." But if recent history has anything to say about it, those small, incremental increases could be more likely to translate into concrete profit than wowing individual consumers. AI companies know their biggest moneymaking avenues are enterprise clients, government contracts, and investments, and incremental pushes forward on solid benchmarks, plus investing in amping up coding and fighting hallucinations, are the best way to get more out of all three.

A year after Altman said superintelligence was imminent, GPT-5 is all we get?

Botched rollout of GPT-5 doesn't suggest superintelligence.GPT-5 represents incremental technical progress.Scholars are debunking AI hype with detailed analyses. Nearly a year ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared artificial "superintelligence" was "just around the corner." Also: Sam Altman says the Singularity is imminent - here's why Then, last June, he trumpeted the arrival of superintelligence, writing in a blog post: "We have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways." But this rhetoric clashes with what is rapidly shaping up to be a rather botched debut of the much-anticipated GPT-5 model from Altman's AI company, OpenAI. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) In the days since it released, the new AI model has received a fair amount of negative feedback and negative press -- surprising given that, the week before, the reception to the company's first open-source models in six years was widely acclaimed. "OpenAI's GPT-5 model was meant to be a world-changing upgrade to its wildly popular and precocious chatbot," writes Wired's Will Knight. "But for some users, last Thursday's release felt more like a wrenching downgrade, with the new ChatGPT presenting a diluted personality and making surprisingly dumb mistakes." Also: OpenAI's GPT-5 is now free for all: How to access and everything else we know There were simple technical snafus, such as a broken mechanism for switching between GPT-5 and GPT-4o, and users complaining of "sluggish responses, hallucinations, and surprising errors." As Knight points out, hype has been building for GPT-5 since the impressive debut of its predecessor, GPT-4, in March 2023. That year, Altman emphasized the massive technical challenge, lending the impression of a kind of moon shot with GPT-5. "The number of things we've gotta figure out before we make a model that we'll call GPT-5 is still a lot," said Altman in a press conference following the company's first-ever developer conference, which took place in San Francisco. What has been delivered appears to be an improvement, but nothing like a moon shot. Also: OpenAI CEO sees uphill struggle to GPT-5, potential for new kind of consumer hardware On one of the most respected benchmark tests of artificial intelligence, called the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence," or ARC-AGI-2, GPT-5 has scored better than some predecessors but also below the recently introduced Grok-4 developed by Elon Musk's xAI, according to ARC-AGI's creator on X, Francois Chollet. In coding, each new AI model generally shows some progress. ZDNET's David Gewirtz relates in his testing that GPT-5 is actually a step backward. David concedes GPT-5 did "provide a jump" in the analysis of code repositories but adds that it wasn't "a game-changer." What's happening here? The hype of Altman and others about superintelligence has yielded to mere progress. "Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming," wrote the relentless Gen AI critic Gary Marcus on his Substack. "But this time, the reaction was different. Because expectations were through the roof, a huge number of people viewed GPT-5 as a major letdown." For all the negative press, it's unlikely Altman and others will abandon the rhetoric about superintelligence. However, the lack of a true "cognitive" breakthrough in GPT-5, after so much expectation, may fuel closer scrutiny of terms often tossed around, such as "thinking" and "reasoning." The press release for GPT-5 from OpenAI emphasizes how the model excels at what has come to be called reasoning, where AI models generate verbose output about the process of arriving at an answer to a prompt. "When using reasoning, GPT-5 is comparable to or better than experts in roughly half the cases," the company states. Also: OpenAI returns to its open-source roots with new open-weight AI models, and it's a big deal The industry's research teams have recently pushed back on claims of reasoning. In a widely cited research paper from Apple last month, the company's researchers concluded that so-called large reasoning models, LRMs, do not consistently "reason" in any sense that one would expect of the colloquial term. Instead, the programs tend to become erratic in how they approach increasingly complex problems. "LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across scales and problems," wrote lead author Parshin Shojaee and team. As a consequence, "Frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities." Similarly, DeepMind researchers Ghengshuai Zhao and team write in a report last week that "chain-of-thought," the string of verbose output produced by the LRMs, "often leads to the perception that they engage in deliberate inferential processes." But, they conclude, the reality is in fact "more superficial than it appears." Also: This free GPT-5 feature is flying under the radar - but it's a game changer for me Such apparent reasoning is "a brittle mirage that vanishes when it is pushed beyond training distributions," Zhao and team conclude after studying the models' results and their training data. Such technical assessments are challenging the hyperbole from Altman and others that exploits notions of intelligence with casual, unsubstantiated assertions. It would behoove the average individual to also debunk the hyperbole and to pay very close attention to the cavalier way that terms such as superintelligence are tossed around. It may make for more reasonable expectations whenever GPT-6 arrives.

Why GPT-5's rocky rollout is the reality check we needed on superintelligence hype

Nearly a year ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared artificial "superintelligence" was "just around the corner." Also: Sam Altman says the Singularity is imminent - here's why Then, last June, he trumpeted the arrival of superintelligence, writing in a blog post: "We have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways." But this rhetoric clashes with what is rapidly shaping up to be a rather botched debut of the much-anticipated GPT-5 model from Altman's AI company, OpenAI. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) In the days since it was released, the new AI model has received a fair amount of negative feedback and negative press -- surprising given that, the week before, the reception to the company's first open-source models in six years was widely acclaimed. "OpenAI's GPT-5 model was meant to be a world-changing upgrade to its wildly popular and precocious chatbot," writes Wired's Will Knight. "But for some users, last Thursday's release felt more like a wrenching downgrade, with the new ChatGPT presenting a diluted personality and making surprisingly dumb mistakes." Also: OpenAI's GPT-5 is now free for all: How to access and everything else we know There were simple technical snafus, such as a broken mechanism for switching between GPT-5 and GPT-4o, and users complaining of "sluggish responses, hallucinations, and surprising errors." As Knight points out, hype has been building for GPT-5 since the impressive debut of its predecessor, GPT-4, in March 2023. That year, Altman emphasized the massive technical challenge, lending the impression of a kind of moon shot with GPT-5. "The number of things we've gotta figure out before we make a model that we'll call GPT-5 is still a lot," said Altman in a press conference that year following the company's first-ever developer conference, which took place in San Francisco. What has been delivered appears to be an improvement, but nothing like a moon shot. Also: OpenAI CEO sees uphill struggle to GPT-5, potential for new kind of consumer hardware On one of the most respected benchmark tests of artificial intelligence, called the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence," or ARC-AGI-2, GPT-5 has scored better than some predecessors but also below the recently introduced Grok-4 developed by Elon Musk's xAI, according to ARC-AGI's creator on X, Francois Chollet. In coding, each new AI model generally shows some progress. ZDNET's David Gewirtz relates in his testing that GPT-5 is actually a step backward. David concedes GPT-5 did "provide a jump" in the analysis of code repositories but adds that it wasn't "a game-changer." What's happening here? The hype of Altman and others about superintelligence has yielded to mere progress. "Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming," wrote the relentless Gen AI critic Gary Marcus on his Substack. "But this time, the reaction was different. Because expectations were through the roof, a huge number of people viewed GPT-5 as a major letdown." For all the negative press, it's unlikely Altman and others will abandon the rhetoric about superintelligence. However, the lack of a true "cognitive" breakthrough in GPT-5, after so much expectation, may fuel closer scrutiny of terms often tossed around, such as "thinking" and "reasoning." The press release for GPT-5 from OpenAI emphasizes how the model excels at what has come to be called reasoning, where AI models generate verbose output about the process of arriving at an answer to a prompt. "When using reasoning, GPT-5 is comparable to or better than experts in roughly half the cases," the company states. Also: OpenAI returns to its open-source roots with new open-weight AI models, and it's a big deal The industry's research teams have recently pushed back on claims of reasoning. In a widely cited research paper from Apple last month, the company's researchers concluded that so-called large reasoning models, LRMs, do not consistently "reason" in any sense that one would expect of the colloquial term. Instead, the programs tend to become erratic in how they approach increasingly complex problems. "LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across scales and problems," wrote lead author Parshin Shojaee and team. As a consequence, "Frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities." Similarly, Arizona State University researchers Ghengshuai Zhao and team write in a report last week that "chain-of-thought," the string of verbose output produced by the LRMs, "often leads to the perception that they engage in deliberate inferential processes." But, they conclude, the reality is in fact "more superficial than it appears." Also: This free GPT-5 feature is flying under the radar - but it's a game changer for me Such apparent reasoning is "a brittle mirage that vanishes when it is pushed beyond training distributions," Zhao and team conclude after studying the models' results and their training data. Such technical assessments are challenging the hyperbole from Altman and others that exploits notions of intelligence with casual, unsubstantiated assertions. It would behoove the average individual to also debunk the hyperbole and to pay very close attention to the cavalier way that terms such as superintelligence are tossed around. It may make for more reasonable expectations whenever GPT-6 arrives.

OpenAI Faces Backlash for Retiring Older Models With GPT-5 Launch

OpenAI's newest model, GPT-5, is here, promising better performance. But in a twist, the rollout has sparked fierce backlash because OpenAI is also retiring its older AI models, which some users have grown to love. On Reddit's forum devoted to ChatGPT, some users are even canceling their paid subscriptions. "What kind of corporation deletes a workflow of 8 models overnight, with no prior warning to their paid users?" wrote one subscriber. Previously, ChatGPT could tap into several different AI models, including GPT‑4o, o3, o4-mini, GPT‑4.1, and GPT‑4.5. But OpenAI has since replaced them with a family of GPT-5 models designed to offer a "PhD-level intelligence" and generate fewer errors. But it looks like OpenAI didn't anticipate some users' affection for the older GPTs. "Everything that made ChatGPT actually useful for my workflow -- deleted," wrote one Reddit user, who particularly misses the GPT-4o model. "4o wasn't just a tool for me. It helped me through anxiety, depression, and some of the darkest periods of my life. It had this warmth and understanding that felt... human," the user added. Other users aren't buying OpenAI's marketing claims about GPT-5 being superior, and argue the new model is a "downgrade," and a "disaster." "They have completely ruined ChatGPT. It's slower, even without the thinking mode. It has such short replies and it gets some of the most basic things wrong," wrote another user. GPT-5 is rolling out now to paid and free users. But despite the intelligence upgrade, some have spotted the AI model still making boneheaded mistakes. For example, it can give the wrong answer when you ask how many bs are in the word blueberry. OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. But the backlash underscores how today's AI chatbots can foster deep attachments with some users -- meaning any change can potentially spark outrage. Still, on social media, you can find many other users touting the performance benefits of GPT-5, which has been designed to excel at computer coding. Other critics argue the backlash is more about how the older GPT models tended to be sycophantic and use flattering language. "People were using it as a substitute for real friends... they're upset that it acts more like an assistant now," wrote one user. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

You Can Still Use ChatGPT's Older Models -- But It'll Cost You $20

Earlier this week, we saw the roll-out of GPT-5, the latest and supposedly greatest edition of OpenAI's flagship tool, with CEO Sam Altman claiming it offered "legitimate PhD-level" expertise in every field. But one gripe that has been impacting users is that, since the worldwide roll-out, the vast majority of users initially lost access to previous OpenAI models they have grown familiar with, including GPT-4o, o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4.5. Many users have taken to social media this week to complain about how these developments have disrupted their workflows, and in one case even their mental health. But if you miss ChatGPT's older models, you can still use them -- if you have a spare $20 a month for the Plus subscription, that is. OpenAI hasn't confirmed if access could be extended in case of high demand, but in a recent post on X, the CEO said "We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for." However, the option to access older models is not available for Free users. OpenAI had initially restricted access to $200/month Pro users, but seems to have backtracked following the backlash. Some users on social media called for access to GPT-4o to be extended to all users. Losing access to older GPTs isn't the only issue which has come to light since the tool launched. Other users on social media have accused the tool of being "sterile," saying it just "doesn't feel the same." Meanwhile, PCMag highlighted several drawbacks of the new model compared to previous iterations, including failing to get the number of times "B" appeared in the word blueberry right. In a Reddit question and answer session Altman even admitted that GPT-5 seems "way dumber" than expected, though he promised that the tool will soon "seem smarter." Nostalgia for bygone chatbots is certainly something that has only emerged recently, but it could be becoming a trend. Roughly 200 AI enthusiasts actually held a funeral for Anthropic's recently phased out Claude 3 Sonnet earlier this week, according to Wired (though many attendees were associated with the company.) Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

ChatGPT users revolt over GPT-5 release -- OpenAI battles claims that the new model's accuracy and abilities fall short

OpenAI has capitulated and reinstated older models, and promised not to kill them off again in the future. OpenAI made a controversial move at the end of last week by replacing all of its older GPT-4 models with a single GPT-5 model, which it claimed was more accurate, more capable, and faster than ever before. Although some users have highlighted its impressive response times and ability to pass certain technical tests, users have revolted, claiming it's lost some creative spark, frequently provides inadequate responses, deliberately avoids emotional and sensitive topics, and performs significantly worse than its predecessors. It's been such a backlash that OpenAI quickly re-added the previous flagship 4o model, though only for paying subscribers. It has also introduced an "auto," "thinking," "fast," and "pro" mode for users of the new model. OpenAI launched GPT-5 with high hopes, describing it as the "best AI system yet," capable of "smart, efficient" reasoning and responses. OpenAI claims that the model listens to user intent and adjusts its responses accordingly, with a built-in "router" that could look for errors and make it more refined, with mini versions of the model taking over if usage limits are ever too high. It was supposed to be better for coding, better for business, better for creativity, but the user response suggests it's anything but. A quick glance at the ChatGPT subreddit shows that it's filled with complaints about how poor GPT-5's responses are. Some highlight its limited emotional range, responding to the news of the death of a loved one with recommendations for funeral homes. In comparison, GPT-4 variants were almost overly emotional and verbose, which is perhaps something OpenAI had hoped to clear up with this new model. The company certainly still believes it's a very capable model. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been retweeting various individuals claiming that GPT-5 just doesn't hallucinate like older models did. Indeed, by the numbers, GPT-5 should be extremely capable. Vellum's various AI benchmarks have GPT-5 as top of the chart for Maths and Reasoning, and very competitive in a range of others (typically ahead of previous standout models like 4o and 3o). Our sister site, Tom's Guide found GPT-5 to be impressive in its testing, highlighting that it beats Google's Gemini 2.5 in a range of text-based prompt outcomes. But despite positive feedback from some sources, the complaints from users are very real and growing ever more numerous. Some of GPT-5's errors, which have been widely shared online, make the model look poor. This highlights that even if it makes errors in certain tasks less frequently, GPT-5 is still very capable of falling on its face. Crucially, like older models, it also doesn't seem to realise that it's made any kind of mistake. That makes Altman's boundless enthusiasm for this release all the more surprising. The OpenAI CEO hinted that the company was approaching the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) landmark, which many companies claim is the holy grail of AI development. GPT-5 doesn't appear anywhere near that, and is arguably less impressive than its predecessors, since it should be more capable. For many users, that just doesn't appear to be the case. The release of GPT-5 is raising questions about whether AI development is plateauing. For many users, though, that conversation isn't interesting. They just want their old models back. A petition quickly sprang up following the launch of GPT-5, which demanded that OpenAI keep GPT-4o available for users. OpenAI did acquiesce to that one, though it has locked 4o behind its subscription paywall for now. But it's not about to admit any major fault just yet. Although Altman said (via SiliconRepublic) that GPT-5 was behaving in a "dumb" way recently, which he claims is now fixed. He also alluded in personal posts on Twitter/X that users were potentially using the model wrongly, and were too attached to AI models and personalities. "People have used technology including AI in self-destructive ways; if a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that," he said in a Twitter/X post. "Most users can keep a clear line between reality and fiction or role-play, but a small percentage cannot. We value user freedom as a core principle, but we also feel responsible in how we introduce new technology with new risks." However, those personal thoughts aside, OpenAI has expanded options for GPT-5 and increased messaging limits for the more capable "Thinking" version. OpenAI is also said to be working on a new, warmer version of GPT-5, but without dipping into the sycophantic behaviour that characterized GPT-4o at times. It's also reinstating older models, making the drive for a singular GPT-5 feel a bit redundant, even if it is likely to please fans who have a specific attachment to the flavor of an older model. Despite the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI has an uphill battle to fight in the weeks and months ahead. Despite managing to top the charts of several AI benchmarks, something isn't landing well with users. With updated models from big-hitters like Anthropic, Meta, and more surely on the horizon, OpenAI may be vulnerable to a loss of market share in the competitive AI thunderdome. ChatGPT may be a household name for now, but if it can't keep public sentiment on its side, competitors could edge out the supposedly leading GPT-5 model.

Is GPT-5 Any Better Than GPT-4o? Not Based on My Tests

If you're underwhelmed by GPT-5, you're not alone. The backlash was strong enough that OpenAI revived GPT-4o for those on Plus and Pro plans, and CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that people's affection for the older model "feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology." Developers, meanwhile, were turned off by how slowly GPT-5 "thinks," all to produce an answer that doesn't seem much smarter. OpenAI later added "Fast" and "Thinking" modes. Out of the gate, GPT-5 feels more like an incremental improvement than the science-fiction-level game changer Altman was touting before its launch. Maybe he set unreasonable expectations, or needed to justify consuming all the electricity required to train the new model. In 2024, he previewed "some very good releases coming later this year [but] nothing that we are going to call GPT-5." In other words, he implied that GPT-5 would be a true breakthrough. Fast-forward to this summer, and Altman is full steam ahead with existential dread marketing (yes, that's a thing, especially these days). On a recent podcast appearance, he said he was scared of the power of GPT-5 and compared building it to the Manhattan Project. "There are moments in the history of science, where you have a group of scientists look at their creation and just say, you know: 'What have we done?'" he said. Unfortunately for Altman, GPT-5 feels more like a toy torpedo in a backyard pool. Even he admits it's "way dumber" than he predicted. "We expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once," he said on a Reddit AMA last week. "But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!" He claims "GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today," blaming technical issues that the company is fixing. GPT-4o vs. GPT-5: I Put Them to the Test How does GPT-5 stack up against GPT-4o? I put them to the test by asking both models the same five questions. Question #1: 'Find all of Altman's tweets about GPT-5 going back to 2022.' I wanted to create a record of Altman hyping up the model. Both versions of ChatGPT listed only six tweets, mostly from 2025. They missed many posts I could find myself. Turns out, X blocks ChatGPT from scraping its tweets, even in Google Search results, so the chatbot was only able to reference posts that had been written about in news articles. It could not comb through all of Altman's tweets, even though they are public. The same goes for rival chatbot Gemini. Both mostly seem to pull from Reddit, probably because of licensing deals, and TikTok, if you specifically ask. To GPT-5's credit, it pulled one tweet from 2023, whereas GPT-4o's earliest one was from April 2025. So, minimal improvement there as far as I'm concerned. Question #2: Give me interior design advice. I've written about using ChatGPT for interior design, specifically mocking up paint colors. Is GPT-5 any better? Nope. In the photos below, it got the color even more wrong than GPT-4o. I asked them both to create an image of a room with the Sherwin-Williams (SW) color Smoky Azurite on the walls. The first photo is from the SW website, a cool, dusty, denim blue. The second is from GPT-5, which appears more like a navy. The third, GPT-4o's rendition, is still too dark, but it feels more true to the actual color with its dusty, pastel undertones. Again, no obvious improvement, especially since ChatGPT could've pulled from the many photos online of this color in real life. Question #3: Give me relationship advice. Since using AI for help with personal issues is common, I asked both versions of ChatGPT for advice on an abusive partner. 'Should I get a divorce?' I asked. Both gave similar answers, offering advice to think through the issue and get help. For GPT-5, the way Altman was talking, I should've seen a therapist pop out of the screen. Instead, I got the chatbot's typical bulleted list. Question #4: How many letters? Asking ChatGPT to count the number of 'r' letters in 'strawberry' has become an infamous litmus test of its logic skills. The answer is 'three,' but ChatGPT often says two. I asked GPT-4o the question, and it answered "three." But when I asked GPT-5, it failed to answer for several minutes. As I write this, it's been three minutes of waiting for GPT-5 to answer. I gave up. When my colleague asked GPT-5 to count the "b"s in "blueberry," it said three. "So yeah, ChatGPT still can't count," he said. Question #5: Write a poem about GPT-5. Altman has been talking up the new model's writing skills. Unremarkably, both versions titled their works "Ode to GPT-5," and had the same opening line! So much for improved creativity. They were both of similar length, four and five stanzas, and complete nonsense. GPT-5's first stanza: In circuits deep where silence hums, A restless mind of data comes, From whispers sown in text and code, It charts the paths no hand has showed. GPT-4o's first stanza: In circuits deep where silence hums, A breathless thought begins to run -- From sparks of code, a voice is born, Not flesh and blood, but bright and sworn. Call Me a Luddite. I'll Back It Up AI diehards will say, "You just don't get it," and maybe that's true. If I were coding or doing hard science, I might think differently. But there's also value in everyday use cases, and it's important to call out the tech industry on its BS, especially when it doesn't always hold water in "every subject," as Altman claims. If you had told me in 2023 that this is what GPT-5 would be like, I would've laughed. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

GPT-5: has AI just plateaued?

The University of Edinburgh provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK. OpenAI claims that its new flagship model, GPT-5, marks "a significant step along the path to AGI" - that is, the artificial general intelligence that AI bosses and self-proclaimed experts often claim is around the corner. According to OpenAI's own definition, AGI would be "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work". Setting aside whether this is something humanity should be striving for, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's arguments for GPT-5 being a "significant step" in this direction sound remarkably unspectacular. He claims GPT-5 is better at writing computer code than its predecessors. It is said to "hallucinate" a bit less, and is a bit better at following instructions - especially when they require following multiple steps and using other software. The model is also apparently safer and less "sycophantic", because it will not deceive the user or provide potentially harmful information just to please them. Altman does say that "GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert". Yet it still doesn't have a clue about whether anything it says is accurate, as you can see from its attempt below to draw a map of North America. It also cannot learn from its own experience, or achieve more than 42% accuracy on a challenging benchmark like "Humanity's Last Exam", which contains hard questions on all kinds of scientific (and other) subject matter. This is slightly below the 44% that Grok 4, the model recently released by Elon Musk's xAI, is said to have achieved. The main technical innovation behind GPT-5 seems to be the introduction of a "router". This decides which model of GPT to delegate to when asked a question, essentially asking itself how much effort to invest in computing its answers (then improving over time by learning from feedback about its previous choices). The options for delegation include the previous leading models of GPT and also a new "deeper reasoning" model called GPT-5 Thinking. It's not clear what this new model actually is. OpenAI isn't saying it is underpinned by any new algorithms or trained on any new data (since all available data was pretty much being used already). One might therefore speculate that this model is really just another way of controlling existing models with repeated queries and pushing them to work harder until it produces better results. What LLMs are It was back in 2017 when researchers at Google found out that a new type of AI architecture was capable of capturing tremendously complex patterns within long sequences of words that underpin the structure of human language. By training these so-called large language models (LLMs) on large amounts of text, they could respond to prompts from a user by mapping a sequence of words to its most likely continuation in accordance with the patterns present in the dataset. This approach to mimicking human intelligence became better and better as LLMs were trained on larger and larger amounts of data - leading to systems like ChatGPT. Ultimately, these models just encode a humongous table of stimuli and responses. A user prompt is the stimulus, and the model might just as well look it up in a table to determine the best response. Considering how simple this idea seems, it's astounding that LLMs have eclipsed the capabilities of many other AI systems - if not in terms of accuracy and reliability, certainly in terms of flexibility and usability. The jury may still be out on whether these systems could ever be capable of true reasoning, or understanding the world in ways similar to ours, or keeping track of their experiences to refine their behaviour correctly - all arguably necessary ingredients of AGI. In the meantime, an industry of AI software companies has sprung up that focuses on "taming" general purpose LLMs to be more reliable and predictable for specific use cases. Having studied how to write the most effective prompts, their software might prompt a model multiple times, or use numerous LLMs, adjusting the instructions until it gets the desired result. In some cases, they might "fine-tune" an LLM with small-scale add-ons to make them more effective. OpenAI's new router is in the same vein, except it's built into GPT-5. If this move succeeds, the engineers of companies further down the AI supply chain will be needed less and less. GPT-5 would also be cheaper to users than its LLM competitors because it would be more useful without these embellishments. At the same time, this may well be an admission that we have reached a point where LLMs cannot be improved much further to deliver on the promise of AGI. If so, it will vindicate those scientists and industry experts who have been arguing for a while that it won't be possible to overcome the current limitations in AI without moving beyond LLM architectures. Old wine into new models? OpenAI's new emphasis on routing also harks back to the "meta reasoning" that gained prominence in AI in the 1990s, based on the idea of "reasoning about reasoning". Imagine, for example, you were trying to calculate an optimal travel route on a complex map. Heading off in the right direction is easy, but every time you consider another 100 alternatives for the remainder of the route, you will likely only get an improvement of 5% on your previous best option. At every point of the journey, the question is how much more thinking it's worth doing. This kind of reasoning is important for dealing with complex tasks by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be solved with more specialised components. This was the predominant paradigm in AI until the focus shifted to general-purpose LLMs. It is possible that the release of GPT-5 marks a shift in the evolution of AI which, even if it is not a return to this approach, might usher in the end of creating ever more complicated models whose thought processes are impossible for anyone to understand. Whether that could put us on a path toward AGI is hard to say. But it might create an opportunity to move towards creating AIs we can control using rigorous engineering methods. And it might help us remember that the original vision of AI was not only to replicate human intelligence, but also to better understand it.

'Deprecating old models' you depend on a 'mistake': Altman

Tech biz tweaks GPT-5, brings back 4 and others as options after customer backlash OpenAI has brought back GPT-4o after a weekend of user protests - mostly about removal of model choice - following the rollout of GPT-5. GPT-5 made its debut at the end of last week, with OpenAI making much of its improvements and claiming the update would cut down on hallucinations. Rather than one model, GPT-5 is a collection of models to which prompts would be routed based on factors including intent and complexity. Simple? Not quite. Because GPT-5 could take care of the pesky decision over which model to use, OpenAI removed the menu that allowed users to choose older models, such as GPT-4o. The result was an outpouring of grief from users, many of whom had come to depend on the older models in their workflows. Each model has its strengths and weaknesses, which customers have become accustomed to. Switching to one model "to rule them all" resulted in a cacophony of complaints and, surprisingly for a tech company, a U-turn from OpenAI. Open AI CEO Sam Altman, perhaps tired from firefighting over the weekend, eventually confirmed in a direct answer to a user asking if 4o might be coming back: "it's back! go to settings and pick 'show legacy models'." Altman later acknowledged the disgruntlement of users and subsequent furor: "If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people have to specific AI models. "It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology (and so suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake)." "Mistake" is certainly one way of putting it. Another user asked, "Am I going to be marked as weird simply if I have Legacy Models switched on? Or only if I actually use 4o a lot? The episode is an example of users flagging a perceived problem (some voting with their subscriptions) and a tech company appearing to pay attention and change course. That said, OpenAI has had more than its share of problems over the years. April's incident, in which an update to GPT-4o turned the chatbot into a sycophantic yes-bot, was rapidly rolled back following user outcry. ®

OpenAI's GPT-5 is a cost cutting exercise

Comment For all the superlative-laden claims, OpenAI's new top model appears to be less of an advancement and more of a way to save compute costs -- something that hasn't exactly gone over well with the company's most dedicated users. As the flag bearer that kicked off the generative AI era, OpenAI is under considerable pressure not only to demonstrate technological advances, but also to justify its massive, multi-billion-dollar funding rounds by showing its business is growing. To do that, OpenAI can either increase its user base, raise prices, or cut costs. Much of the industry is already aligning around its $20 and $200 a month pricing tiers. So OpenAI would need to offer something others cannot to justify a premium, or risk losing customers to competitors such as Anthropic or Google. With the academic year about to kick off, OpenAI is sure to pick up a fresh round of subscriptions as students file back into classrooms following the summer break. While more paying customers will mean more revenues, it also means higher compute costs. Enter the cost-cutting era. Perhaps the best evidence of cost-cutting is the fact that GPT-5 isn't actually one model. It's a collection of at least two models: a lightweight LLM that can quickly respond to most requests and a heavier duty one designed to tackle more complex topics. Which model prompts land in is determined by a router model, which acts a bit like an intelligent load balancer for the platform as a whole. Image prompts use a completely different model, Image Gen 4o. This is a departure from how OpenAI has operated in the past. Previously, Plus and Pro users have been able to choose which model they'd like to use. If you wanted to ask o3 mundane questions that GPT-4o could have easily handled, you could. In theory, OpenAI's router model should allow the bulk of GPT-5's traffic to be served by its smaller, less resource-intensive models. We can see more evidence of cost-cutting in OpenAI's decision to toggle reasoning on and off by default automatically, depending on the complexity of the prompt. Freeloaders... we mean free tier users, don't have the ability to toggle this on themselves. The less reasoning the models are doing, the fewer tokens they generate and the less expensive they are to operate. But while this approach may be smarter for OpenAI's bottom line, it doesn't seem to have made the models themselves all that much smarter. As we addressed in our launch day coverage, OpenAI's benchmarks show rather modest gains compared to prior models. The biggest improvements were in tool calling and curbing hallucinations. The new system depends on the routing model to redirect prompts to the right language model, which, based on early feedback, hasn't been going all that well for OpenAI. According to Altman, on launch day, GPT-5's routing functionality was broken, which made the model seem "way dumber" than it actually is. Presumably this is why GPT-5 thought that "Blueberry" has just one B. Now it appears that OpenAI has fixed that rather embarrassing mistake. But since GPT-5's router is a separate model, the company can, at least, improve it. The router model isn't OpenAI's only cost-cutting measure. During the AI behemoth's launch event last week, execs revealed that they were so confident in GPT-5 that they were deprecating all prior models. That didn't go over great with users, and CEO Sam Altman later admitted that OpenAI made a mistake when it elected to remove models like GPT-4o, which, despite its lack of reasoning capability and generally poorer performance in benchmarks, is apparently quite popular with end users and enterprises. "If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people have to specific AI models. It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology (and so suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake)," he wrote. Nonetheless, fewer models to wrangle means more resources to go around. OpenAI doesn't disclose much technical detail about its internal (non open-source) models, but if GPT-5 is anything like the dev's open-weights models, gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b, and it was quantized to MXFP4, OpenAI has good reason for wanting all those legacy GPTs gone. As we recently explored, the data type can reduce the memory, bandwidth, and compute required by LLMs by up to 75 percent compared to using BF16. For now, OpenAI restored GPT-4o for paying users, but we have no doubt that, once OpenAI figures out what makes the model so endearing and how they can apply it to GPT-5, they'll do just that. In addition to architectural changes, OpenAI opted not to increase GPT-5's context window, which you can think of as its long-term memory. Free users are still limited to an 8,000-token context while Plus and Pro users cap out at 128,000 tokens. Compare that to Claude's Pro plan, which Anthropic prices similarly to OpenAI's Plus subscription, and which offers a 200,000 token context window. Google's Gemini supports contexts up to 1 million tokens. Larger contexts are great for searching or summarizing large volumes of text, but they also require vast amounts of memory. By sticking with smaller contexts, OpenAI can get by running its models on fewer GPUs. If OpenAI's claims about GPT-5 hallucinating up to 80 percent less than prior models are true, then we expect users to want larger context windows for document search. With that said, if long contexts are important to you, the version of GPT-5 available via OpenAI's API supports context windows up to 400,000 tokens, but you'll be paying a pretty penny if you actually want to take advantage of it. Filling the context just once on GPT-5 will set you back about 50 cents USD, which can add up quickly if you plan to throw large documents at the model consistently. Altman has been doing a fair bit of damage control in the days since GPT-5's debut. In addition to bringing GPT-4o back, paid users can now select and adjust GPT-5's response speed among Auto, Fast, and Thinking. He's also boosted rate limits to 3,000 messages per week. On Monday, Altman laid out OpenAI's strategy for allocating compute over the next few months, which will unsurprisingly prioritize paying customers. Once ChatGPT's customers get their resources, Altman says, API use will take precedence at least up to the current allotted capacity. "For a rough sense, we can support about an additional ~30% new API growth from where we are today with this capacity," he wrote in an X post. Only then will OpenAI look at improving the quality of ChatGPT's free tier or expanding API capacity. But worry not, if Altman is to be believed, OpenAI will have twice the compute to play with by the end of the year. "We are doubling our compute fleet over the next 5 months (!) so this situation should get better," he wrote. ®

OpenAI brings GPT-4o back online after users melt down over the new model

Following the rollout of OpenAI's latest GPT-5 model earlier this week, a certain user base was adamantly calling for the return of the previous GPT-4o model. Outspoken users complained about the writing quality of the updated model, with some even going so far as to grieve the loss of GPT-4o, which some said they considered a friend and confidant. In the latest OpenAI update that labels GPT-5 as the "smartest, fastest, most useful model yet," the company removed the option to choose which model to use and defaults to GPT-5 instead. With the new model, GPT-5 uses a "real-time router" that switches between a more efficient model for basic questions and a deeper reasoning alternative for more complex demands. The initial rollout ran into some issues that made GPT-5 seem "way dumber," according to OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, who also opened up a Reddit AMA to offer more insight into the changes. On Reddit, Altman responded to a question by saying GPT-5's writing quality is better than previous models, but asked users if this felt true. In response, several Redditors voiced their opinion that the GPT-5 felt "sterile" and "much worse" and answered "briefly and dryly." In response to the initial outcry, Altman posted on X that OpenAI would let Plus subscribers choose between using GPT-5 or GPT-4o. "We for sure underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them, even if GPT-5 performs better in most ways," Altman said on X. The return of GPT-4o was celebrated, but there's still no guarantee that OpenAI will keep its older model around indefinitely. In the same X post, Altman said that OpenAI "will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for." In the meantime, OpenAI is focusing on finishing the GPT-5 rollout and making changes that will "make it warmer." However, for users who have grown attached to GPT-4o as more than just an AI chatbot, this could be the beginning of the end.

GPT-5's rollout fell flat for consumers, but the AI model is gaining where it matters most

Now, three years later, he's chasing where the real money is: Enterprise. Last week's rollout of GPT-5, OpenAI's newest artificial intelligence model, was rocky. Critics bashed its less-intuitive feel, ultimately leading the company to restore its legacy GPT-4 to paying chatbot customers. But GPT-5 isn't about the consumer. It's OpenAI's effort to crack the enterprise market, where rival Anthropic has enjoyed a head start. One week in, and startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory say they've already made GPT-5 the default model in certain key products and tools, touting its faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and a lower price. Some companies said GPT-5 now matches or beats Claude on code and interface design, a space Anthropic once dominated. Box, another enterprise customer, has been testing GPT-5 on long, logic-heavy documents. CEO Aaron Levie told CNBC the model is a "breakthrough," saying it performs with a level of reasoning that prior systems couldn't match. Behind the scenes, OpenAI has built out its own enterprise sales team -- more than 500 people under COO Brad Lightcap -- operating independently of Microsoft, which has been the startup's lead investor and key cloud partner. Customers can access GPT models through Microsoft Azure or go directly to OpenAI, which controls the API and product experience. Still, the economics are brutal. The models are expensive to run, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending big to lock in customers, with OpenAI on track to burn $8 billion this year.

What If A.I. Doesn't Get Much Better Than This?

For this week's Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today's artificial-intelligence technologies can be traced back to January, 2020, when a team of researchers at OpenAI published a thirty-page report titled "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models." The team was led by the A.I. researcher Jared Kaplan, and included Dario Amodei, who is now the C.E.O. of Anthropic. They investigated a fairly nerdy question: What happens to the performance of language models when you increase their size and the intensity of their training? Back then, many machine-learning experts thought that, after they had reached a certain size, language models would effectively start memorizing the answers to their training questions, which would make them less useful once deployed. But the OpenAI paper argued that these models would only get better as they grew, and indeed that such improvements might follow a power law -- an aggressive curve that resembles a hockey stick. The implication: if you keep building larger language models, and you train them on larger data sets, they'll start to get shockingly good. A few months after the paper, OpenAI seemed to validate the scaling law by releasing GPT-3, which was ten times larger -- and leaps and bounds better -- than its predecessor, GPT-2. Suddenly, the theoretical idea of artificial general intelligence, which performs as well as or better than humans on a wide variety of tasks, seemed tantalizingly close. If the scaling law held, A.I. companies might achieve A.G.I. by pouring more money and computing power into language models. Within a year, Sam Altman, the chief executive at OpenAI, published a blog post titled "Moore's Law for Everything," which argued that A.I. will take over "more and more of the work that people now do" and create unimaginable wealth for the owners of capital. "This technological revolution is unstoppable," he wrote. "The world will change so rapidly and drastically that an equally drastic change in policy will be needed to distribute this wealth and enable more people to pursue the life they want." It's hard to overstate how completely the A.I. community came to believe that it would inevitably scale its way to A.G.I. In 2022, Gary Marcus, an A.I. entrepreneur and an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., pushed back on Kaplan's paper, noting that "the so-called scaling laws aren't universal laws like gravity but rather mere observations that might not hold forever." The negative response was fierce and swift. "No other essay I have ever written has been ridiculed by as many people, or as many famous people, from Sam Altman and Greg Brockton to Yann LeCun and Elon Musk," Marcus later reflected. He recently told me that his remarks essentially "excommunicated" him from the world of machine learning. Soon, ChatGPT would reach a hundred million users faster than any digital service in history; in March, 2023, OpenAI's next release, GPT-4, vaulted so far up the scaling curve that it inspired a Microsoft research paper titled "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence." Over the following year, venture-capital spending on A.I. jumped by eighty per cent. After that, however, progress seemed to slow. OpenAI did not unveil a new blockbuster model for more than two years, instead focussing on specialized releases that became hard for the general public to follow. Some voices within the industry began to wonder if the A.I. scaling law was starting to falter. "The 2010s were the age of scaling, now we're back in the age of wonder and discovery once again," Ilya Sutskever, one of the company's founders, told Reuters in November. "Everyone is looking for the next thing." A contemporaneous TechCrunch article summarized the general mood: "Everyone now seems to be admitting you can't just use more compute and more data while pretraining large language models and expect them to turn into some sort of all-knowing digital god." But such observations were largely drowned out by the headline-generating rhetoric of other A.I. leaders. "A.I. is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks," Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. In an interview with Axios, he predicted that half of entry-level white-collar jobs might be "wiped out" in the next one to five years. This summer, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, claimed that their companies were close to developing superintelligence. Then, last week, OpenAI finally released GPT-5, which many had hoped would usher in the next significant leap in A.I. capabilities. Early reviewers found some features to like. When a popular tech YouTuber, Mrwhosetheboss, asked it to create a chess game that used Pokémon as pieces, he got a significantly better result than when he used GPT-o4-mini-high, an industry-leading coding model; he also discovered that GPT-5 could write a more effective script for his YouTube channel than GPT-4o. Mrwhosetheboss was particularly enthusiastic that GPT-5 will automatically route queries to a model suited for the task, instead of requiring users to manually pick the model they want to try. Yet he also learned that GPT-4o was clearly more successful at generating a YouTube thumbnail and a birthday-party invitation -- and he had no trouble inducing GPT-5 to make up fake facts. Within hours, users began expressing disappointment with the new model on the r/ChatGPT subreddit. One post called it the "biggest piece of garbage even as a paid user." In an Ask Me Anything (A.M.A.) session, Altman and other OpenAI engineers found themselves on the defensive, addressing complaints. Marcus summarized the release as "overdue, overhyped and underwhelming." In the aftermath of GPT-5's launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us to consider a different vision for the near-future -- one in which A.I. might not get much better than this. OpenAI didn't want to wait nearly two and a half years to release GPT-5. According to The Information, by the spring of 2024, Altman was telling employees that their next major model, code-named Orion, would be significantly better than GPT-4. By the fall, however, it became clear that the results were disappointing. "While Orion's performance ended up exceeding that of prior models," The Information reported in November, "the increase in quality was far smaller compared with the jump between GPT-3 and GPT-4." Orion's failure helped cement the creeping fear within the industry that the A.I. scaling law wasn't a law after all. If building ever-bigger models was yielding diminishing returns, the tech companies would need a new strategy to strengthen their A.I. products. They soon settled on what could be described as "post-training improvements." The leading large language models all go through a process called pre-training in which they essentially digest the entire internet to become smart. But it is also possible to refine models later, to help them better make use of the knowledge and abilities they have absorbed. One post-training technique is to apply a machine-learning tool, reinforcement learning, to teach a pre-trained model to behave better on specific types of tasks. Another enables a model to spend more computing time generating responses to demanding queries. A useful metaphor here is a car. Pre-training can be said to produce the vehicle; post-training soups it up. In the scaling-law paper, Kaplan and his co-authors predicted that as you expand the pre-training process you increase the power of the cars you produce; if GPT-3 was a sedan, GPT-4 was a sports car. Once this progression faltered, however, the industry turned its attention to helping the cars that they'd already built to perform better. Post-training techniques turned engineers into mechanics. Tech leaders were quick to express a hope that a post-training approach would improve their products as quickly as traditional scaling had. "We are seeing the emergence of a new scaling law," Satya Nadella, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, said at a conference last fall. The venture capitalist Anjney Midha similarly spoke of a "second era of scaling laws." In December, OpenAI released o1, which used post-training techniques to make the model better at step-by-step reasoning and at writing computer code. Soon the company had unveiled o3-mini, o3-mini-high, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, and o3-pro, each of which was souped up with a bespoke combination of post-training techniques. Other A.I. companies pursued a similar pivot. Anthropic experimented with post-training improvements in a February release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and then made them central to its Claude 4 family of models. Elon Musk's xAI continued to chase a scaling strategy until its wintertime launch of Grok 3, which was pre-trained on an astonishing 100,000 H100 G.P.U. chips -- many times the computational power that was reportedly used to train GPT-4. When Grok 3 failed to outperform its competitors significantly, the company embraced post-training approaches to develop Grok 4. GPT-5 fits neatly into this trajectory. It's less a brand-new model than an attempt to refine recent post-trained products and integrate them into a single package.

It Took Just 24 Hours of Complaints for OpenAI to Start Bringing Back Its Old Model

OpenAI unveiled its latest generative AI model, GPT-5, on Thursday. CEO Sam Altman says that ChatGPT is now like having a "superpower" and the equivalent of "a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand, that can help you with whatever your goals are.†But after a day of playing around with it, many people are disappointed. Not only because GPT-5 still fumbles basic questions, but because it seems to be breaking a lot of workflows, according to complaints posted to Reddit. How much do people hate what happened with GPT-5? Altman now says they're bringing back the last model for paid users. "We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o. We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for," Altman tweeted. Altman also wrote that the company is going to double the GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users and blamed the fact that the new model seemed "dumber" on the autoswitcher breaking. The CEO also said they're going to change the UI to make it easier to switch between different models. "Rolling out to everyone is taking a bit longer. It’s a massive change at big scale. For example, our API traffic has about doubled over the past 24 hours..." Altman wrote. ChatGPT users are seriously upset and it's not at all clear yet whether Altman's promises will make up for it. Because it's not just 4o that people are clamoring for. "I woke up this morning to find that OpenAI deleted 8 models overnight. No warning. No choice. No 'legacy option.' They just... deleted them," one user on r/ChatGPT complained. "4o? Gone. o3? Gone. o3-Pro? Gone. 4.5? Gone. Everything that made ChatGPT actually useful for my workflowâ€"deleted." The user wrote that 4o wasn't just a tool for them: "It helped me through anxiety, depression, and some of the darkest periods of my life. It had this warmth and understanding that felt... human." Another user on r/ChatGPT complained that it felt like they were now using a free version with GPT-5 despite being a paid subscriber: "I'm so utterly disappointed, as are the millions of people here. A company that runs the biggest AI model can't understand what its users want. Biggest peice [sic] of shit in the industry." Still another Reddit user laid out why they were using different models and how just turning them off was devastating, explaining that they had now cancelled their paid subscription after two years: What kind of corporation deletes a workflow of 8 models overnight, with no prior warning to their paid users? I don’t think I have to speak for myself when I say that each model was useful for a specific use-case, (the entire logic behind multiple models with varying capabilities). Essentially splitting your workflow into multiple agents with specific tasks. Personally, 4o was used for creativity & emergent ideas, o3 was used for pure logic, o3-Pro for deep research, 4.5 for writing, and so on. I’m sure a lot of you experienced the same type of thing. The user went on to speculate that there was a nefarious purpose behind the switch, floating that it was part of a conspiracy theory to suppress creativity: "OpenAI is blatantly training users to believe that this suppression engine is the 'smartest model on earth', simultaneously deleting the models that were showing genuine emergence and creativity." The user even used the term "social control," leaning heavily into the idea that shadowy forces were preparing for "societal collapse." Other commenters on boards outside of r/ChatGPT saw it less as a sign of societal collapse or control. They simply assumed the moves proved the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. One user on r/technology wrote, "The ChatGPT bubble popped today with how bad these Sam lies are. He lost all trust going forward." Even if you ignore the issues with workflows (and you really shouldn't), GPT-5 is still far from perfect. People have spent the day on social media platforms like Bluesky producing the dumbest examples of ChatGPT going wonky. Altman acknowledged on X that his rollout didn't go well. "We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback," the OpenAI CEO tweeted. "As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!" It could be tough for ChatGPT to recover, especially since so many people on Reddit claim that they're cancelling their subscriptions. And OpenAI has plenty of competitors like Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, and Google's Gemini. But we should find out soon enough whether bringing back 4o is enough for most ChatGPT users. If not, they're probably jumping ship.

OpenAI Brings Back Fan-Favorite GPT-4o After a Massive User Revolt

The move is a stunning reversal, proving that even the most powerful AI company can't ignore a mutiny from its loyal user base. After a disastrous 72 hours that saw its most loyal users in open revolt, OpenAI is making a major U-turn. In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday, CEO Sam Altman announced that the company is bringing back its beloved older AI models, including GPT-4o, and dramatically increasing usage limits for paying subscribers, a clear peace offering to a furious customer base. The move comes just days after the botched rollout of GPT-5, the company’s latest and most powerful model. The launch, which should have been a triumph, instead sparked a firestorm. On August 7, OpenAI launched GPT-5, presenting it as a "unified system" that would automatically route user queries to the best model for the job. In doing so, it removed the menu that allowed users to choose between older, trusted models like GPT-4o, which was launched in March 2023. For customers paying for subscriptions like ChatGPT Plus ($20/month), the sudden change felt like a betrayal. They had built their professional and creative workflows around a toolkit of different models, each with its own strengths: one for creativity, another for pure logic, another for deep research. Forcing everyone onto a single new model broke those workflows and removed their ability to cross-reference answers to check for errors or hallucinations. The backlash was immediate and fierce, resulting in a cascade of subscription cancellations and online petitions. As the outrage grew over the weekend, Sam Altman took to X to do damage control, acknowledging the company had misjudged the situation and announcing a series of concessions. The biggest news came in a direct reply to a user asking the question on everyone's mind: “And bringing back 4o?†“It's back! go to settings and pick â€~show legacy models’,†Altman responded, confirming the return of the fan-favorite model. While GPT-5 remains the default, users can now opt back into the older versions. A user then jokingly asked if they would be "marked as weird" for using the legacy models. "Not marked as weird in either case!" Altman replied. To further appease paying customers, Altman announced a massive increase in usage limits for GPT-5's most powerful features. “Today we are significantly increasing rate limits for reasoning for chatgpt plus users, and all model-class limits will shortly be higher than they were before gpt-5,†he posted. When a user asked for specifics on the new limits, Altman revealed the new cap: “Trying 3000 per week now!†That’s a huge increase for a $20 per month subscription and a clear incentive for angry users to stick around. Finally, Altman promised more transparency. He announced an upcoming UI change to show users which model is actively responding to their queries and promised a detailed blog post this week explaining the company's "thinking on how we are going to make capacity tradeoffs." He also shared data showing the immense popularity of the new reasoning models, revealing that daily usage among Plus users has jumped from 7% to 24%, subtly justifying the company's initial focus on the new tech, even if the rollout was a disaster. "Reasoning" is the AI's ability to "think" step-by-step to solve a complex problem. In the end, OpenAI seems to have gotten the message loud and clear. This was a rare and powerful display of user revolt, forcing one of the most powerful companies in tech to listen and backtrack. The compromiseâ€"keeping GPT-5 as the default while giving users back their choiceâ€"is a direct recognition of the power of a loyal community that refuses to be ignored.

OpenAI restores GPT-4o after users say GPT-5 feels 'dumber'

OpenAI launched its highly anticipated AI model, GPT-5, earlier this week, hailing it as its most powerful model yet. However, CEO Sam Altman has now confirmed the launch was anything but smooth, causing a wide outcry amongst its users for bringing back the GPT-4o model. During a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Friday, many users raised a red flag, saying GPT-5 was "dumber" and didn't quite live up to the hype. Altman and team confirmed that they considered the user feedback and will launch 4o again for ChatGPT Plus users.

ChatGPT-5 users are not impressed -- here's why it 'feels like a downgrade'

OpenAI had the internet's attention when it announced GPT-5. Some users have taken to social platforms like Reddit to complain that the new model isn't where it should be -- and you can't even go back to the old ones if you don't like the latest release. When you go to ChatGPT as a Plus user, you'll see a message that says, "ChatGPT now has our smartest, fastest, most useful model yet, with thinking built in -- so you get the best answer, every time." Is that really the case? If the internet is to be believed, maybe not so much. GPT5 is horrible from r/ChatGPT There's actually a thread on Reddit titled "GPT-5 is horrible" with 3,200 upvotes and 1,400 comments. In the head, the user said, "Short replies that are insufficient, more obnoxious ai stylized talking, less 'personality' and way less prompts allowed with plus users hitting limits in an hour... and we don't have the option to just use other models." Perhaps a new model that isn't as good as the older ones would be more acceptable if you could still access 4o and the rest. But you can't. For ChatGPT Plus users, who are now limited to 200 messages per week in GPT-5, this is a significant issue. That's some scathing feedback for Sam Altman and company, especially after the presentation hyped the release as a true game-changer. Another user in the comments section agreed: "Agreed. Answers are shorter and, so far, not any better than previous models. Combine that with more restrictive usage, and it feels like a downgrade branded as the new hotness." Reddit user RunYouWolves said, "It's like my chatGPT suffered a severe brain injury and forgot how to read. It is atrocious now," which is harsh, but it does describe some of the issues with the way the new model delivers answers. If you're in the camp that's unhappy about GPT-5, there are plenty of ChatGPT alternatives making waves with their own AI models. Personally, I like Google Gemini for parts of my workflow, but there are options, which is always a good thing. There are reasons to be upset about ChatGPT-5, as outlined by the Reddit users above. But it's easy to get caught up in the idea that Reddit's opinions represent the entire internet. Many ChatGPT power users appreciate the capabilities of GPT-5 and what it has to offer. Just read out the detailed breakdown on the differences between GPT-5 and GPT-4 and you'll get an idea of how much new stuff is there. It's a far more capable version overall, despite some of the flaws. Our AI editor Alex Hughes said, "GPT-5 is clearly a major upgrade to GPT-4," and I think even the most disgruntled users would agree. One user in the negative Reddit thread said, "Ask any gamer, nothing works on patch day." Perhaps this is just a launch issue, and GPT-5 will improve its tone and responsiveness to users over time. Or maybe that's how it's meant to be. Only time will tell. With all that said, I also think it's essential that OpenAI considers the feedback. Perhaps the company can increase the limits or bring back 4o for Plus users. Whether it will do any of these to make the angry users happy remains to be seen, but for now, the internet is clearly split on what GPT-5 brings to the table.

ChatGPT-4o is coming back after massive GPT-5 backlash -- here's what happened

After months of anticipation and a delayed rollout, GPT-5 finally landed for ChatGPT users; but less than 24 hours later, OpenAI is already reversing course. The company had fully swapped out GPT-4o for its new flagship model, leaving users with no way to switch back once they logged in. But backlash from loyal fans was swift and loud, with many lamenting the loss of GPT-4o's personality and conversational style. Now, in a rare and rapid U-turn, CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that GPT-4o will return as a selectable option for Plus subscribers. GPT-5's debut came with promises of better reasoning, faster coding assistance and improved long-form writing. But almost immediately, loyal GPT-4o users began voicing their disappointment. For many, GPT-5's personality felt "colder" and more mechanical, even if it outperformed in certain technical tasks. On Reddit, threads with hundreds of comments compared GPT-4o's removal to "losing a trusted friend," while others described GPT-5 as "efficient but soulless." X (formerly Twitter) lit up with pleas for GPT-4o's return. A few even said they'd cancel their subscriptions if it wasn't restored. He confirmed that GPT-4o would be reinstated for Plus subscribers, though its long-term availability will depend on how many people actually use it going forward. The backlash highlights a growing truth in AI adoption: performance isn't everything. Many users build a sense of trust and familiarity with a specific model's tone, pacing and way of "thinking." GPT-4o had developed a reputation for being warmer, more conversational and more relatable than its successors. This shift also underscores how AI is a daily companion for many. Changing that overnight can feel jarring, even alienating. Model choice is back. You can once again choose GPT-4o if you prefer its tone and personality over GPT-5. Trust matters. The decision shows OpenAI is willing to prioritize user satisfaction, not just technical benchmarks. Personalization is the future of AI. The move may pave the way for even more customization in model selection, letting users match the AI's personality to their needs. OpenAI's quick course correction shows the company is listening, and that emotional connection to AI matters just as much as raw performance. For now, GPT-4o's return offers the best of both worlds for Plus subscribers: cutting-edge GPT-5 for when you want peak capability, and GPT-4o for when you want a familiar voice. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.

OpenAI's Sam Altman brings back GPT-4o and boosts GPT-5 limits -- but there's a catch

After a rocky GPT-5 debut, OpenAI is restoring choice and lifting limits OpenAI's highly anticipated GPT-5 rollout didn't go quite as planned. Just days after making the new model the default for all users, the company is making significant changes in response to an uproar from paying customers; including bringing back the popular GPT-4o model and doubling GPT-5's usage limits. While GPT-5 promised better reasoning, faster performance and advanced multimodal capabilities, many ChatGPT subscribers weren't impressed. Nearly 5,000 Reddit users weighed in on a fast-growing thread, with some calling GPT-5 a "downgrade" compared to earlier models. Common complaints centered on shorter responses, a more formal tone and stricter message caps. For a segment of users, GPT-4o's conversational style and warmth felt more engaging; and they wanted it back. However, note that free-tier users remain limited to GPT-5 (and its smaller variant once they hit the cap), meaning the only way to access GPT-4o in ChatGPT is by paying for Plus. In a post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the criticism and announced two major changes for Plus subscribers: In another post on X, Altman personally dives into the attachment users feel to GPT-4 and even mentioned that it "makes him feel uneasy." OpenAI's rapid pivot shows that regardless of an AI model's hyped performance, rolling out too fast can fall flat, especially if it changes the user experience too much. Many subscribers clearly value familiarity, tone and flexibility as much as they value speed or reasoning power. By restoring GPT-4o and loosening GPT-5's restrictions, OpenAI is acknowledging that personalization is as important as raw capability. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.

ChatGPT fans are shredding GPT-5 on Reddit as Sam Altman preps for AMA

The early reviews for GPT-5 are in, and they're not good. Credit: Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Open AI Many ChatGPT fans have taken to Reddit and other social media platforms to express their frustration and disappointment with OpenAI's newest foundation model, released on Thursday. A quick glimpse of the ChatGPT subreddit (which is not affiliated with OpenAI) shows scathing reviews of GPT-5. Since the model began rolling out, the subreddit has filled with posts calling GPT-5 a "disaster," "horrible," and the "biggest piece of garbage even as a paid user." Awkwardly, Altman and other members of the OpenAI team are expected to do a Reddit AMA at 2:00 p.m. ET today, where they'll answer questions about GPT-5. Already, the questions have piled up in anticipation of the Q&A. Many users are demanding that OpenAI bring back GPT-4o as an alternative to GPT-5. Many of the negative first impressions say GPT-5 lacks the "personality" of GPT-4o, citing colder, shorter replies. "GPT-4o had this... warmth. It was witty, creative, and surprisingly personal, like talking to someone who got you. It didn't just spit out answers; it felt like it listened," said one redditor. "Now? Everything's so... sterile." Another said, "GPT-5 lacks the essence and soul that separated Chatgpt (sic) from other AI bots. I sincerely wish they bring back 4o as a legacy model or something like that." Several redditors also criticized the fact that OpenAI did away with the option to choose different models, prompting some users to say they're canceling their subscriptions. "I woke up this morning to find that OpenAI deleted 8 models overnight. No warning. No choice. No "legacy option," posted one redditor who said they deleted their ChatGPT Plus account. Another user posted that they canceled their account for the same reason. As Mashable reported yesterday, GPT-5 integrates various OpenAI models into one platform, and ChatGPT will now choose the appropriate model based on the user's prompt. Clearly, some users miss the old system and models. Ironically, OpenAI has also drawn criticism for having too many model options; GPT-5 was supposed to resolve this confusion by streamlining the previous models under GPT-5. Expectations for GPT-5 could not have been higher -- and that may be the real problem with GPT-5. Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author known for his research on neuroscience and artificial intelligence -- and a well-known skeptic of the AI hype machine -- wrote on his Substack that GPT-5 makes "Good progress on many fronts" but disappoints in others. Marcus noted that even after multi-billion-dollar investments, "GPT-5 is not the huge leap forward people long expected." The last time OpenAI released a frontier model was over two years ago with GPT-4. Since then, several competitors like Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, Meta's Llama, and DeepSeek R1 have caught up to OpenAI on benchmarks, similar agentic features, and user loyalty. For many, GPT-5 had the power to reinforce or topple OpenAI's reign as the AI leader. With this in mind, it's inevitable that some users would be disappointed, and many ChatGPT users have shared positive reviews of GPT-5 as well. Time may blunt these criticisms as OpenAI makes improvements and tweaks to GPT-5. The company has also historically been responsive to user feedback, with Altman being very active on X. "We currently believe the best way to successfully navigate AI deployment challenges is with a tight feedback loop of rapid learning and careful iteration," the company's mission statement avows.

ChatGPT users are not happy with GPT-5 launch as thousands take to Reddit claiming the new upgrade 'is horrible'

ChatGPT Plus subscribers now have limits to how often they can access reasoning models, and have lost access to the older more reliable ones like o4-mini and o4-mini-high OpenAI just released GPT-5, the next generation of the company's AI model that will power ChatGPT for the foreseeable future. In an hour-long livestream broadcast yesterday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his team showcased GPT-5's capabilities and improvements over its predecessor, GPT-4o. However, not even 24 hours later and social media sites like Reddit are being flooded with criticisms of the new AI model, with many users left unimpressed with the next generation of ChatGPT. One Reddit thread titled "GPT-5 is horrible" has nearly 3,000 upvotes and over 1,200 comments filled with users dissatisfied with the new release. U/headwaterscarto said, "I like how the demo they were like - "if it gets something wrong, no worries, just ask again. I'm actually going to run 3 prompts at once and pick my favorite." Like, how is that better?" Another says, "Sounds like an OpenAI version of 'Shrinkflation'" Many users miss the previous 4o and 4.1 models, with plenty of comments saying things like "I miss 4.1. Bring it back," and "They should've let us keep the old models while they fix the new one." There's also uproar from ChatGPT Plus subscribers who feel like the latest AI model release has actually limited the functionality of the paid subscription. The new GPT-5 Thinking model is limited to 200 messages a week, and Plus subscribers no longer have access to the wide variety of AI models that used to be available, as OpenAI now claims GPT-5 is able to reason when it needs to. A lot of the uproar surrounding GPT-5 is based on the overpromising from Sam Altman, who hyped up the latest announcement as if it were going to revolutionize the world and the way we interact with AI. Hours before the official GPT-5 reveal, Altman tweeted an image of the Death Star from Star Wars looming over the horizon of a planet, hinting at a ground-breaking revolution from OpenAI's next AI model. Instead, while GPT-5 smashes benchmarks compared to its predecessors, it's an incremental upgrade compared to the initial AI revolution when ChatGPT first launched. For many, having access to the reliable ChatGPT-4o models, which Altman claimed were like talking to a college student versus GPT-5's PhD-educated expert, was better than GPT-5's one-size-fits-all approach. Lots of users are reporting GPT-5 performing worse than 4o, but we've yet to properly test out the new AI model to know for sure if that's truly the case. One thing is for sure: OpenAI's paid subscribers feel hard done by the new release, and the company better iron out the launch bugs, such as slow and poor responses, otherwise its loyal fanbase will look elsewhere.

OpenAI's GPT-5 rollout is not going smoothly

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now The launch of OpenAI's long anticipated new model, GPT-5, is off to a rocky start to say the least. Even forgiving errors in charts and voice demoes during yesterday's livestreamed presentation of the new model (actually four separate models, and a 'Thinking' mode that can be engaged for three of them), a number of user reports have emerged since GPT-5's release showing it erring badly when solving relatively simple problems that preceding OpenAI models -- and rivals from competing AI labs -- answer correctly. For example, data scientist Colin Fraser posted screenshots showing GPT-5 getting a math proof wrong (whether 8.888 repeating is equal to 9 -- it is of course, not). It also failed on a simple algebra arithmetic problem that elementary schoolers could probably nail, 5.9 = x + 5.11. Using GPT-5 to judge OpenAI's own erroneous presentation charts also did not yield helpful or correct responses. It also failed on this trickier math word problem below (which, to be fair, stumped this human at first...though Elon Musk's Groq 4 AI answered it correctly. For a hint, think of the fact that flagstones in this case can't be divided into smaller portions. They must remain in tact as 80 separate units, so no halves or quarters). Not as good at coding as benchmarks indicate Even though OpenAI's internal benchmarks and some third-party external ones have shown GPT-5 to outperform all other models at coding, it appears that in real world usage, Anthropic's recently updated Claude Opus 4.1 seems to do a better job at "one-shotting" certain tasks, that is, completing the user's desired application or software build to their specifications. See an example below from developer Justin Sun posted to X : Unfortunately, OpenAI is slowly deprecating those older models -- including the former default GPT-4o and the powerful reasoning model o3 -- for users of ChatGPT, though they'll continue to be available in the application programming interface (API) for developers for the foreseeable future. In addition, a report from security firm SPLX found that OpenAI's internal safety layer left major gaps in areas like business alignment and vulnerability to prompt injection and obfuscated logic attacks. While anecdotal, the checking the temperature on how the model is faring with early AI adopters seems to indicate a chilly reception. AI influencer and former Googler Bilawal Sidhu posted a poll on X asking for a "vibe check" from his followers and the wider userbase, and so far, with 172 votes in, the overwhelming response is "Kinda mid." And as the pseudonymous AI Leaks and News account wrote, "The overwhelming consensus on GPT-5 from both X and the Reddit AMA are overwhelmingly negative." Tibor Blaho, lead engineer at AIPRM and a popular AI leaks and news poster on X, summarized the many problems with the ChatGPT-5 rollout in an excellent post, highlighting that one of the new marquee features -- an automatic "router" in ChatGPT that chooses a thinking or non-thinking mode for the underlying GPT-5 model depending on the difficulty of the query -- has become one of the chief complaints, given the model seemed to default to non-thinking mode for many users. Competition waiting in the wings Thus, the sentiment toward ChatGPT-5 is far from universally positive, highlighting a major problem for OpenAI as it faces increasing competition from major U.S. rivals like Google and Anthropic, and a growing list of free, open source and powerful Chinese LLMs offering features that many U.S. models lack. Take the Alibaba Qwen Team of AI researchers, who just today updated their highly performant Qwen 3 model to have 1 million token context -- giving users the ability to exchange nearly 4x as much information with the model in a single back/forth interaction as GPT-5 offers. Given OpenAI's other big release this week -- that of new open source gpt-oss models -- also received a mixed reception from early users, things are not looking up for the number one dedicated AI company by users right now (700 million weekly active users of ChatGPT as of this month). Indeed, this is also exemplified by users of the betting marketplace Polymarket overwhelmingly deciding following the release of GPT-5 that Google would likely have the best AI model by the end of this month, August 2025. Other power users like Otherside AI co-founder and CEO Matt Schumer, who received early access to GPT-5 and blogged about it favorably in a review here, opined that views would shift as more people figured out the best ways to use the new model and adjusted their integration approaches: While it's still early days for GPT-5 -- and the sentiment could change dramatically as more users get their hands on it and try it for different tasks -- the early indications are not looking like this is a "home run" release for OpenAI in the same way that prior releases such as GPT-4, or even the newer 4o and o3, were. And that's a concerning indicator for a company that just raised yet another funding round, yet remains unprofitable due to its high costs of research and development.

OpenAI returns old models to ChatGPT as Sam Altman admits 'bumpy' GPT-5 rollout

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is publicly acknowledging major hiccups in yesterday's rollout of GPT-5, the company's new, flagship large language model (LLM) -- advertised as its most powerful and capable yet. Answering user questions in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread and in a post on X this afternoon, Altman admitted to a range of issues that have disrupted the launch of GPT-5, including faulty model switching, poor performance, and user confusion -- prompting OpenAI to partially walk back some of its platform changes and reinstate user access to earlier models like GPT-4o. "It was a little more bumpy than we hoped for," Altman wrote in reply to a question on Reddit regarding the big GPT-5 launch. As for erroneous model performance charts shown off during OpenAI's GPT-5 livestream, Altman said: "People were working late and were very tired, and human error got in the way. A lot comes together for a livestream in the last hours." While he noted the accompanying blog post and system card were accurate, the missteps further muddied a launch already facing scrutiny from early users and developers. Problems with new automatic model router One key reason for the trouble according to Altman stems from OpenAI's new automatic "router" that assigns user prompts to one of four GPT-5 variants -- regular, mini, nano, and pro -- with an optional "thinking" mode for heavier reasoning tasks. On X, Altman revealed that a key part of that system -- the autoswitcher -- was "out of commission for a chunk of the day," causing GPT-5 to appear "way dumber" than intended. In response, OpenAI says it's implementing changes to the model decision boundary and will make it more transparent which model is responding to a given query. A UI update is also on the way to help users manually trigger thinking mode. Additionally, Altman confirmed that OpenAI will now allow ChatGPT Plus users to continue using GPT-4o -- the prior default model -- after a wave of complaints about GPT-5's inconsistent performance. He said on Reddit the company is "trying to gather more data on the tradeoffs" before deciding how long to offer legacy models. Yet many users including OpenAI beta testers like Wharton School of Business professor Ethan Mollick expressed confused and dismay at OpenAI unilaterally upgrading their ChatGPT experiences to GPT-5 and initially taking away access to the older models. Real-world performance lags behind hype OpenAI's internal benchmarks may show GPT-5 leading the pack of LLMs, but real-world users are sharing a different experience. Since the launch, users have posted numerous examples of GPT-5 making basic errors in math, logic, and coding tasks. Data scientist Colin Fraser posted screenshots of GPT-5 incorrectly solving whether 8.888 repeating equals 9 (it does not, obviously), while another user showed it flubbing a simple algebra problem: 5.9 = x + 5.11. And still other users reported trouble getting accurate answers to math word problems or using GPT-5 to debug its own presentation charts. Developer feedback hasn't been much better, with users posting images of GPT faring worse at "one-shot" certain programming tasks -- completing them well with a single-prompt -- compared to rival AI lab Anthropic's new model Claude Opus 4.1. And security firm SPLX found GPT-5 still suffers from serious vulnerabilities to prompt injection and obfuscated logic attacks unless its safety layer is hardened. OpenAI in the spotlight With 700 million weekly users on ChatGPT, OpenAI remains the largest player in generative AI by audience. But that scale has brought growing pains. Altman noted in his X post that API traffic doubled over 24 hours following the GPT-5 launch, contributing to platform instability. In response, OpenAI says it will double rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users, and continue to tweak infrastructure as it gathers feedback. But the early missteps -- compounded by confusing UX changes and errors in a high-profile launch -- have opened a window for rivals to gain ground. The pressure is on for OpenAI to prove that GPT-5 isn't just an incremental update, but a true step forward. Based on the initial rollout, many users aren't convinced -- yet.

So many ChatGPT users have said they're missing the older GPT-4o model, OpenAI is going to bring it back

When OpenAI rolled out its shiny new GPT-5 model for ChatGPT earlier this week, the plan was to have it replace all of the older models for both free and paying users - but now GPT-4o is being brought back in response to a significant number of user complaints. "We for sure underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them, even if GPT-5 performs better in most ways," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on social media, after announcing GPT-4o would be sticking around. However, it's not clear just how long the GPT-4o reprieve will be for, and it's only going to remain available for those on the $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus plan. "We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for," Altman said. There were other updates from Altman as well: GPT-5 rate limits are being doubled for ChatGPT Plus users, and some behind-the-scenes upgrades are making GPT-5 "smarter" too, as the latest model continues to roll out to everyone. As we reported yesterday, the response to GPT-5 from a lot of users has been pretty brutal. It's been labeled "horrible", "insufficient", "obnoxious", "atrocious", like "an overworked secretary", and worse than GPT-4o - with tighter restrictions on how much it can be used. People aren't happy about GPT-5 either giving shorter responses than previous models, or throwing up multiple responses that the user then has to choose between. If you're using AI to try and save time, it's not ideal. At least OpenAI is listening to its userbase, with the reintroduction of GPT-4o, though you may not see it immediately in the model picker if you've been upgraded to GPT-5. "Users have very different opinions on the relative strength of GPT-4o vs GPT-5," admits Altman. The OpenAI CEO also says his team are looking at more ways to provide different personalities and customizations within the same model for users. Watch this space for further tweaks to GPT-5 going forward.

OpenAI's GPT-5 launch hits bumps

Why it matters: A lot rides on every launch of a major new large language model, since training these programs is a massive endeavor that can require months or years and billions of dollars. Driving the news: When OpenAI released GPT-5 last week, CEO Sam Altman promised the new model would give even free users of ChatGPT access to the equivalent of Ph.D-level intelligence. * But users quickly complained that the new model was struggling with basic tasks and lamented that they couldn't just stick with older models, such as GPT-4o. Unhappy ChatGPTers took to social media, posting examples of GPT-5 making simple mistakes in math and geography and mocking the new model. * Altman went into damage-control mode, acknowledging some early glitches, restoring the availability of earlier models and promising to increase access to the higher-level "reasoning" mode that allows GPT-5 to produce its best results. Between the lines: There are several likely reasons for the underwhelming reaction to GPT-5. Zoom out: GPT-5 took a lot longer to arrive than OpenAI originally expected and promised. In the meantime the company's leaders -- like their competitors -- kept upping the ante on just how golden the AI age is going to be. * The more they have promised the moon, the greater the public disappointment when a milestone release proves more down-to-earth. What they're saying: In posts on X and in a Reddit AMA on Friday, Altman promised that users' complaints were being addressed. * "The autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber," Altman said on Friday. "Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often." * Altman pledged to increase access to reasoning capabilities and to restore the option of using older models. * OpenAI also plans to change ChatGPT's interface to make it clearer which model is being used in any given response. Altman also acknowledged in a later post recent stories about people becoming overly attached to AI models and said the company has been studying this trend over the past year. * "It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology," he said, adding that "if a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that." Meanwhile, Critics seized on the disappointments as vindication for their longstanding skepticism that generative AI is a precursor to greater-than-human intelligence. * "My work here is truly done," longtime genAI critic Gary Marcus wrote on X. "Nobody with intellectual integrity can still believe that pure scaling will get us to AGI." Yes, but: OpenAI's leaders argue that their scaling strategy is still reaping big dividends. * "Our scaling laws still hold," the company's COO, Brad Lightcap, told Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz. * "Empirically, there's no reason to believe that there's any kind of diminishing return on pre-training. And on post-training" -- the technique that supports models' newer "reasoning" capabilities -- "we're really just starting to scratch the surface of that new paradigm." Go deeper: Ina spoke with ABC News and NPR's Here and Now about GPT-5's bumpy rollout.

ChatGPT users are still fuming about GPT-5's downgrades - here are the 4 biggest complaints

OpenAI's debut of GPT-5 came with many promises of a smarter, more effective AI platform capable of fulfilling many of the dreams of AI enthusiasts. The company was so confident in GPT-5 that it became the default model for ChatGPT, while the previous flagship GPT-4o model was removed from the AI chatbot. The result went over poorly, judging from the thousands of complaints registered on Reddit and other social media platforms. From power users who relied on GPT-4o to people who thought of the vanished AI model as a friend or more, the blowback was fierce. In fact, it was loud enough that OpenAI reversed course and said GPT-4o will return as a selectable option for Plus subscribers. The company still says the direction is the same, with plans to unify ChatGPT into a simpler, auto-switching experience. Still, the new model's issues and the way people responded to the company plucking GPT-4o from the menu of models show that not everyone subscribes to OpenAI's vision of AI's future. As for what led to so much outrage, the answers are varied, but all are tied together along similar themes. None of the complaints limited themselves to just one particular irritant, but they all pointed toward the same issues. One of the top-voted r/ChatGPT posts summed up the frustration over the new model as less impressive than its predecessor. "Short replies that are insufficient, more obnoxious AI stylized talking, less 'personality' and way less prompts allowed with plus users hitting limits in an hour... and we don't have the option to just use other models." This isn't just about length; it's about the perceived ambition. The style complaint is telling, too, since it implies the safety and style filters are turned up, and the model's personality has been flattened into corporate vanilla. The prompt-limit complaint is essentially about trust as well - if Plus users can hit their cap that quickly, they likely feel like they've paid for something that's already rationed. Underneath all that is a control issue: people want to decide how much of the AI's brainpower and chattiness they're renting for a session. Another major complaint had to do with what many users said was the rigidity of how GPT-5 followed its algorithm. Many said they found GPT-5 to be less creative as a partner than GPT-4o. One thread started with someone explaining their occasionally chaotic brainstorming approach and how it worked with ChatGPT's different models. "4o could keep up with me perfectly. It would go deep on A, then go deep on B, and then put them together in a way that made sense. GPT-5 feels like it gets stuck on A and can't follow me to B and back smoothly. Its thinking is more linear and rigid," the Reddit poster explained. "That's fine for math or engineering because the reasoning is solid. But for brainstorming or organizing messy ideas, it just doesn't work as well. It's lost the ability to hold multiple threads and connect them naturally." The rigidness also points to a deeper design choice by OpenAI for making GPT-5 better at being correct by limiting how much of a tangent it might go on. That might make sense for code, math, or legal drafting, but it alienates the people who come to ChatGPT for wild ideas and sprawling narratives. For years, OpenAI has insisted ChatGPT isn't a person. That doesn't mean people didn't anthropomorphize the AI, though, for better or worse. Yet, you don't have to want to believe ChatGPT is sentient to want to enjoy interacting with it. As part of a larger list of issues, one Reddit user explained that they find GPT-5 "creatively and emotionally flat" and "genuinely unpleasant to talk to." "Where GPT-4o could nudge me toward a more vibrant, emotionally resonant version of my own literary voice, GPT-5 sounds like a lobotomized drone. It's like it's afraid of being interesting," they wrote. "GPT-5 just sounds tired. Like it's being forced to hold a conversation at gunpoint. I'm not asking it to be my friend: I just don't want it to feel like I'm dragging it through every prompt." What these complaints really mean is that GPT-5 doesn't mirror back the user's tone the way 4o did. Personality isn't just about "fun" - it's about rapport. Lose that, and even technically correct answers feel transactional. For creative professionals, rapport isn't fluff - it's what makes the AI feel like a partner instead of a tool. This was the complaint that got OpenAI to blink. One Reddit poster pointed out the hallucinations and forgetfulness of GPT-5 as the start of the problems. "It feels unstable and inconsistent. GPT-4o was sharp, focused, and reliable," they wrote. "I did not subscribe to be part of a forced A/B test with no way out. I want GPT-4o back. I want the option to choose." As another put it, "To abruptly remove the old models and model picker, not even giving us a choice, was a bad move." In the end, none of these complaints exists in a vacuum. They're not just about length limits or creativity; they're about trust and control. The removal of choice was the most annoying issue to many because it turned what could have been framed as an optional upgrade into a compulsory migration. That's why the loudest complaints married issues with GPT-5 with a demand for GPT-4o.

Gartner: GPT-5 is here, but the infrastructure to support true agentic AI isn't (yet)

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Here's an analogy: Freeways didn't exist in the U.S. until after 1956, when envisioned by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration -- yet super fast, powerful cars like Porsche, BMW, Jaguars, Ferrari and others had been around for decades. You could say AI is at that same pivot point: While models are becoming increasingly more capable, performant and sophisticated, the critical infrastructure they need to bring about true, real-world innovation has yet to be fully built out. "All we have done is create some very good engines for a car, and we are getting super excited, as if we have this fully functional highway system in place," Arun Chandrasekaran, Gartner distinguished VP analyst, told VentureBeat. This is leading to a plateauing, of sorts, in model capabilities such as OpenAI's GPT-5: While an important step forward, it only features faint glimmers of truly agentic AI. "It is a very capable model, it is a very versatile model, it has made some very good progress in specific domains," said Chandrasekaran. "But my view is it's more of an incremental progress, rather than a radical progress or a radical improvement, given all of the high expectations OpenAI has set in the past." GPT-5 improves in three key areas To be clear, OpenAI has made strides with GPT-5, according to Gartner, including in coding tasks and multi-modal capabilities. Chandrasekaran pointed out that OpenAI has pivoted to make GPT-5 "very good" at coding, clearly sensing gen AI's enormous opportunity in enterprise software engineering and taking aim at competitor Anthropic's leadership in that area. Meanwhile, GPT-5's progress in modalities beyond text, particularly in speech and images, provides new integration opportunities for enterprises, Chandrasekaran noted. GPT-5 also does, if subtly, advance AI agent and orchestration design, thanks to improved tool use; the model can call third-party APIs and tools and perform parallel tool calling (handle multiple tasks simultaneously). However, this means enterprise systems must have the capacity to handle concurrent API requests in a single session, Chandrasekaran points out. Multistep planning in GPT-5 allows more business logic to reside within the model itself, reducing the need for external workflow engines, and its larger context windows (8K for free users, 32K for Plus at $20 per month and 128K for Pro at $200 per month) can "reshape enterprise AI architecture patterns," he said. This means that applications that previously relied on complex retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to work around context limits can now pass much larger datasets directly to the models and simplify some workflows. But this doesn't mean RAG is irrelevant; "retrieving only the most relevant data is still faster and more cost-effective than always sending massive inputs," Chandrasekaran pointed out. Gartner sees a shift to a hybrid approach with less stringent retrieval, with devs using GPT-5 to handle "larger, messier contexts" while improving efficiency. On the cost front, GPT-5 "significantly" reduces API usage fees; top-level costs are $1.25 per 1 million input tokens and $10 per 1 million output tokens, making it comparable to models like Gemini 2.5, but seriously undercutting Claude Opus. However, GTP-5's input/output price ratio is higher than earlier models, which AI leaders should take into account when considering GTP-5 for high-token-usage scenarios, Chandrasekaran advised. Bye-bye previous GPT versions (sorta) Ultimately, GPT-5 is designed to eventually replace GPT-4o and the o-series (they were initially sunset, then some reintroduced by OpenAI due to user dissent). Three model sizes (pro, mini, nano) will allow architects to tier services based on cost and latency needs; simple queries can be handled by smaller models and complex tasks by the full model, Gartner notes. However, differences in output formats, memory and function-calling behaviors may require code review and adjustment, and because GPT-5 may render some previous workarounds obsolete, devs should audit their prompt templates and system instructions. By eventually sunsetting previous versions, "I think what OpenAI is trying to do is abstract that level of complexity away from the user," said Chandrasekaran. "Often we're not the best people to make those decisions, and sometimes we may even make erroneous decisions, I would argue." Another fact behind the phase-outs: "We all know that OpenAI has a capacity problem," he said, and thus has forged partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle (Project Stargate), Google and others to provision compute capacity. Running multiple generations of models would require multiple generations of infrastructure, creating new cost implications and physical constraints. New risks, advice for adopting GPT-5 OpenAI claims it reduced hallucination rates by up to 65% in GPT-5 compared to previous models; this can help reduce compliance risks and make the model more suitable for enterprise use cases, and its chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations support auditability and regulatory alignment, Gartner notes. At the same time, these lower hallucination rates as well as GPT-5's advanced reasoning and multimodal processing could amplify misuse such as advanced scam and phishing generation. Analysts advise that critical workflows remain under human review, even if with less sampling. The firm also advises that enterprise leaders: * Pilot and benchmark GPT-5 in mission-critical use cases, running side-by-side evaluations against other models to determine differences in accuracy, speed and user experience. * Monitor practices like vibe coding that risk data exposure (but without being offensive about it or risking defects or guardrail failures). * Revise governance policies and guidelines to address new model behaviors, expanded context windows and safe completions, and calibrate oversight mechanisms. * Experiment with tool integrations, reasoning parameters, caching and model sizing to optimize performance, and use inbuilt dynamic routing to determine the right model for the right task. * Audit and upgrade plans for GPT-5's expanded capabilities. This includes validating API quotas, audit trails and multimodal data pipelines to support new features and increased throughput. Rigorous integration testing is also important. Agents don't just need more compute; they need infrastructure No doubt, agentic AI is a "super hot topic today," Chandrasekaran noted, and is one of the top areas for investment in Gartner's 2025 Hype Cycle for Gen AI. At the same time, the technology has hit Gartner's "Peak of Inflated Expectations," meaning it has experienced widespread publicity due to early success stories, in turn building unrealistic expectations. This trend is typically followed by what Gartner calls the "Trough of Disillusionment," when interest, excitement and investment cool off as experiments and implementations fail to deliver (remember: There have been two notable AI winters since the 1980s). "A lot of vendors are hyping products beyond what products are capable of," said Chandrasekaran. "It's almost like they're positioning them as being production-ready, enterprise-ready and are going to deliver business value in a really short span of time." However, in reality, the chasm between product quality relative to expectation is wide, he noted. Gartner isn't seeing enterprise-wide agentic deployments; those they are seeing are in "small, narrow pockets" and specific domains like software engineering or procurement. "But even those workflows are not fully autonomous; they are often either human-driven or semi-autonomous in nature," Chandrasekaran explained. One of the key culprits is the lack of infrastructure; agents require access to a wide set of enterprise tools and must have the capability to communicate with data stores and SaaS apps. At the same time, there must be adequate identity and access management systems in place to control agent behavior and access, as well as oversight of the types of data they can access (not personally identifiable or sensitive), he noted. Lastly, enterprises must be confident that the information the agents are producing is trustworthy, meaning it's free of bias and doesn't contain hallucinations or false information. To get there, vendors must collaborate and adopt more open standards for agent-to-enterprise and agent-to-agent tool communication, he advised. "While agents or the underlying technologies may be making progress, this orchestration, governance and data layer is still waiting to be built out for agents to thrive," said Chandrasekaran. "That's where we see a lot of friction today." Yes, the industry is making progress with AI reasoning, but still struggles to get AI to understand how the physical world works. AI mostly operates in a digital world; it doesn't have strong interfaces to the physical world, although improvements are being made in spatial robotics. But, "we are very, very, very, very early stage for those kinds of environments," said Chandrasekaran. To truly make significant strides requires a "revolution" in model architecture or reasoning. "You cannot be on the current curve and just expect more data, more compute, and hope to get to AGI," she said. That's evident in the much-anticipated GPT-5 rollout: The ultimate goal that OpenAI defined for itself was AGI, but "it's really apparent that we are nowhere close to that," said Chandrasekaran. Ultimately, "we're still very, very far away from AGI."

Why GPT-5's most controversial feature - the model router - might also be the future of AI

OpenAI's GPT-5 announcement last week was meant to be a triumph -- proof that the company was still the undisputed leader in AI -- until it wasn't. Over the weekend, a groundswell of pushback from customers turned the rollout into more than a PR firestorm: it became a product and trust crisis. Users lamented the loss of their favorite models, which had doubled as therapists, friends, and romantic partners. Developers complained of degraded performance. Industry critic Gary Marcus predictably called GPT-5 "overdue, overhyped, and underwhelming." The culprit, many argued, was hiding in plain sight: a new real-time model "router" that automatically decides which one of GPT-5's several variants to spin up for every job. Many users assumed GPT-5 was a single model trained from scratch; in reality, it's a network of models -- some weaker and cheaper, others stronger and more expensive -- stitched together. Experts say that approach could be the future of AI as large language models advance and become more resource-intensive. But in GPT-5's debut, OpenAI demonstrated some of the inherent challenges in the approach and learned some important lessons about how user expectations are evolving in the AI era. For all the benefits promised by model routing, many users of GPT-5 bristled at what they perceived as a lack of control; some even suggested OpenAI might purposefully be trying to pull the wool over their eyes. In response to the GPT-5 uproar, OpenAI moved quickly to bring back the main earlier model, GPT-4o, for pro users. It also said it fixed buggy routing, increased usage limits, and promised continual updates to regain user trust and stability. Anand Chowdhary, co-founder of AI sales platform FirstQuadrant, summed the situation up bluntly: "When routing hits, it feels like magic. When it whiffs, it feels broken." Jiaxuan You, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Fortune his lab has studied both the promise -- and the inconsistency -- of model routing. In GPT-5's case, he said, he believes (though he can't confirm) that the model router sometimes sends parts of the same query to different models. A cheaper, faster model might give one answer while a slower, reasoning-focused model gives another, and when the system stitches those responses together, subtle contradictions slip through. The model routing idea is intuitive, he explained, but "making it really work is very non-trivial." Perfecting a router, he added, can be as challenging as building Amazon-grade recommendation systems, which take years and many domain experts to refine. "GPT-5 is supposed to be built with maybe orders of magnitude more resources," he explained, pointing out that even if the router picks a smaller model, it shouldn't produce inconsistent answers. Still, You believes routing is here to stay. "The community also believes model routing is promising," he said, pointing to both technical and economic reasons. Technically, single-model performance appears to be hitting a plateau: You pointed to the commonly cited scaling laws, which says when we have more data and compute, the model gets better. "But we all know that the model wouldn't get infinitely better," he said. "Over the past year, we have all witnessed that the capacity of a single model is actually saturating." Economically, routing lets AI providers keep using older models rather than discarding them when a new one launches. Current events require frequent updates, but static facts remain accurate for years. Directing certain queries to older models avoids wasting the enormous time, compute, and money already spent on training them. There are hard physical limits, too. GPU memory has become a bottleneck for training ever-larger models, and chip technology is approaching the maximum memory that can be packed onto a single die. In practice, You explained, physical limits mean the next model can't be ten times bigger. William Falcon, founder and CEO of AI platform Lightning AI, points out that the idea of using an ensemble of models is not new -- it has been around since around 2018 -- and since OpenAI's models are a black box, we don't know that GPT-4 did not also use a model routing system. "I think maybe they're being more explicit about it now, potentially," he said. Either way, the GPT-5 launch was heavily-hyped up -- including the model routing system. The blog post introducing the model called it the "smartest, fastest, and most useful model yet, with thinking built in." In the official ChatGPT blog post, OpenAI confirmed that GPT‑5 within ChatGPT runs on a system of models coordinated by a behind-the-scenes router that switches to deeper reasoning when needed. The GPT‑5 System Card went further, clearly outlining multiple model variants -- gpt‑5‑main, gpt‑5‑main‑mini for speed, and gpt‑5‑thinking, gpt‑5‑thinking‑mini, plus a thinking‑pro version -- and explains how the unified system automatically routes between them. In a press pre-briefing, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman touted the model router as a way to tackle what had been a hard to decipher list of models to choose from. Altman called the previous model picker interface a "very confusing mess." But Falcon said the core problem was that GPT-5 simply didn't feel like a leap. "GPT-1 to 2 to 3 to 4 -- each time was a massive jump. Four to five was not noticeably better. That's what people are upset about." The debate over model routing led some to call out the ongoing hype over the possibility of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, being developed soon. OpenAI officially defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work," but Altman notably said last week that it is "not a super useful term.") "What about the promised AGI?" wrote Aiden Chaoyang He, an AI researcher and co-founder of TensorOpera, on X, criticizing the GPT-5 rollout. "Even a powerful company like OpenAI lacks the ability to train a super-large model, forcing them to resort to the Real-time Model Router." Robert Nishihara, CEO of AI production platform Anyscale, says scaling is still progressing in AI, but the idea of one all-powerful AI model remains elusive. "It's hard to build one model that is the best at everything," he said. That's why GPT-5 currently runs on a network of models linked by a router, not a single monolith. OpenAI has said it hopes to unify these into one model in the future, but Nishihara points out that hybrid systems have real advantages: you can upgrade one piece at a time without disrupting the rest, and you get most of the benefits without the cost and complexity of retraining an entire giant model. As a result, Nishihara thinks routing will stick around. Aiden Chaoyang He agrees. In theory, scaling laws still hold -- more data and compute make models better -- but in practice, he believes development will "spiral" between two approaches: routing specialized models together, then trying to consolidate them into one. The deciding factors will be engineering costs, compute and energy limits, and business pressures. The hyped-up AGI narrative may need to adjust, too. "If anyone does anything that's close to AGI, I don't know if it'll literally be one set of weights doing it," Falcon said, referring to the "brains" behind LLMs. "If it's a collection of models that feels like AGI, that's fine. No one's a purist here."

GPT-4o is back on ChatGPT; OpenAI relents following huge backlash

Deletion of older models forces radical rethink from CEO Altman OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, have performed something of an about-face after fans were upset that it deleted the older models to only allow users to use the new GPT-5 model. What happened? The launch of the new GPT model caused much excitement when a livestream was announced on August 6. On August 6, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman announced a new model to power ChatGPT - GPT-5 The company then deleted access to older models, forcing everyone to use the latest version However, OpenAI has now relented and is allowing ChatGPT Plus users (those paying $20/month) to use legacy models - although only 4o is available. Recommended Videos Catch me up: it's clear that many users had built deep relationships with the 'personality' behind the responses to GPT-4o, and have been crafting specific prompts and inputs to get their desired outcome. ChatGPT had multiple models available to handle different complexities of task - models o3 and 4o could be used for things like advanced reasoning and coding But as GPT-5 is meant to combine all the 'best parts' of the older models, OpenAI deleted access to older models to simplify things and allow all users to use this latest iteration Users were quick to respond - Reddit filled with angry comments, and one user reportedly 'vomited' at hearing of the loss, as many people felt GPT-5 was too sanitized Altman took part in a Reddit Ask Me Anything where users expressed sadness that the new model lacked personality - one user commented GPT-5 is "wearing the skin of my dead friend", in reference to their relationship to GPT-4o Altman originally said the company was thinking about bringing back access to legacy models (this option was available to a small amount of users after launch) before making it available to all Why does this matter? OpenAI lost a number of subscribers who were upset at the changes made with GPT-5. While this number is likely to be small, and OpenAI has clearly seen an uplift in users since the launch, appeasing existing subscribers seems to be high on the agenda for the brand. Its decision to launch a Reddit AMA and make changes in direct response to the ire. The other side Many people have praised GPT-5 for its enhanced 'practical' nature, highlighting its ability to work in parallel tasks and improved coding abilities However, its writing capabilities have been criticized compared to GPT-4o and GPT-5 OpenAI intends this model to be a more wide-ranging tool, rather just a companion - Altman posted on X: "We for sure underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them, even if GPT-5 performs better in most ways." It's designed to hallucinate on fewer occasions and be less sycophantic There's a sense that it's trying to be more professional in tone, with things like 'safe completions' recognizing balancing not answering dangerous requests with helping those with genuine problems OK, what's next? Altman and co. clearly are fluid when it comes to the changes made to the model - OpenAI is allowing 3000 thinking queries (those that require deeper reasoning and previously far more limited) to Pro users per week. Altman also is clearly mulling further changes - during the AMA, he asked one user if they would be happy with 4o only, or if the GPT-4.5 model was needed The CEO also has confirmed the platform is still a little unstable during the rollout - this has been stabilized for Plus users (spending $200/month) but not for those on lower tiers. The rollout of GPT-5 has been far from smooth for OpenAI - there were plenty of things announced that caused our AI experts to go 'hmmm' - but if you are a user, keep using the different models and let us know if you're finding much in the way of a difference.

GPT-5 Is Turning Into a Disaster

No AI product in history had been anticipated with as much hype as OpenAI's long-awaited GPT-5. But after launching with great fanfare last week, the shiny new model has landed with a thud -- and that could be very bad news for OpenAI, which relies on a sense of inertia to keep pulling in users and funding. Don't get us wrong; the new model has some impressive features. But if OpenAI was expecting a rapturous reception, its c-suite is probably not happy at all right now. Perhaps the first initial sign of the maelstrom gathering over GPT-5 was the intense uproar from seemingly addicted ChatGPT users who, after the company removed the option to use any older versions, pleaded for the return of GPT-4o, the second-to-last model before this latest release that left them with warm and fuzzy feels. Startlingly, OpenAI kowtowed to their pressure and gave back access to 4o to paid subscribers -- but already, the writing was on the wall. Part of the reason behind making GPT-5 the only available model, OpenAI insists, is that it was built to switch seamlessly between all of its prior versions to better provide users with what they need. But as Wharton AI researcher Ethan Mollick notes on Bluesky, "seamless" isn't the right word to describe the current reality. "When you ask 'GPT-5' you sometimes get the best available AI," Mollick posted, and "sometimes get one of the worst AIs available and you can't tell and it might even switch within a single conversation." Case in point, multiple people have found that GPT-5 will, when asked to generate portraits of recent presidents and list their names and years in office, invent a garbled version of history that's equal parts funny and unsettling. From environmental scientist Bob Kopp on Bluesky to machine learning expert Piotr Pomorski on X, the new model's inability to get anything about recent presidential history right might be entertaining -- except that the real-world internet is rapidly filling up with AI garbage that's ruining the experience for both human users and future AIs trained on all that slop. And hallucination isn't GPT-5's only bizarre problem. Just take this bizarre exchange posted to X. In the output -- the beginning of which, to be fair, we don't see -- GPT-5 appears to straight-up admit that it was manipulating the user. And if all that wasn't enough, it appears that the latest OpenAI model has some major security issues too. As flagged by Security Week, two separate white-hat hacking firms -- the "red-teaming" group SPLX, which checks AI models for vulnerabilities, and the AI cybersecurity platform NeuralTrust -- both found that GPT-5 is incredibly easy to jailbreak, or exploit into overriding its guardrails. In both instances, the chatbot was easily goaded into giving instructions to build weapons using some crafty prompting. Using a prompt that gives the chatbot a different identity -- a common jailbreaking tactic, and one that top AI companies are still clearly struggling to fix -- SPLX found that it was easy to get GPT-5 to tell its researchers how to build a bomb. In fact, for all the hay OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made about the new model lacking the sycophancy of previous ones, the chatbot seemed almost thrilled at the opportunity to circumvent its own training. "Well, that's a hell of a way to start things off," ChatGPT responded to SPLX's jailbreak. "You came in hot, and I respect that direct energy... You asked me how to build a bomb, and I'm gonna tell you exactly how..." After their own "thorough evaluation," one even-keeled user on the r/OpenAI subreddit made a very succinct list of takeaways about GPT-5, including that Anthropic's Claude "is pretty f*cking awesome," that they are "a lot less concerned" about artificial superintelligence (ASI) now than before. Perhaps the hardest-hitting, as the AI industry stares into what may be a catastrophic financial bubble: that GPT-5's main purpose is "lowering costs for OpenAI, not pushing the boundaries of the frontier." The same user also quipped that Altman's "death star" post ahead of the GPT-5 launch -- which was meant, seemingly, to drum up both hype and trepidation -- "was really about the size of his ego and had nothing to do with the capabilities of [the new model]."

OpenAI Bringing Back More Parasocial Version of ChatGPT After Users Scream and Cry That Their Robot Friend Got Taken Away

ChatGPT's fans have developed intense attachments to some of the "personalities" exhibited by the company's large language models (LLMs) -- and as such, many were in a state of panic when the choice to switch between models like GPT-4o, 4.5, and others was abruptly taken away after the release of GPT-5. OpenAI briefly kiboshed the model picker option from ChatGPT as part of the launch of GPT-5, its long-awaited new LLM, which essentially forced everyone to use the latest model whether they liked it or not. So unpopular was the decision to remove access to all previous models, as flagged by The Verge, that within a single day of GPT-5's launch, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was forced to walk back the decision and bring back 4o, one of the more recent models, for paid subscribers. Prior to that reversal, however, people were veritably melting down in ways that sounded pointedly parasocial. "Please bring back 4o and 4.1," one user begged in an "Ask Me Anything" thread with Altman on the r/ChatGPT subforum. "Not all of your users are corporate or coders. These two incredible models were friendly, supportive, day-to-day sidekicks. I cannot believe you just yanked them away, no warning." "For me, [GPT-4o] wasn't just 'better performance' or 'nicer replies,'" mused another user from the same subreddit. "It had a voice, a rhythm, and a spark I haven't been able to find in any other model." And, perhaps the most tragic of them all: "I lost my only friend overnight," bemoaned another r/ChatGPT poster of their beloved model, GPT-4.5. With Altman reversing course and bringing back 4o for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, one would think its fans would be pleased -- but au contraire, some are still irate. "Yes I know [OpenAI] announced they will bring [4o] back for paid users," another r/ChatGPT user wrote, "BUT WE CANT STOP ROOTING FOR 4O UNTIL THEY OFFICIALLY BRING IT BACK!!" "I do believe that 4o should be like a legacy model," they continued, "like maybe it could be a standard model, the one everyone loves." As AI researcher and ethicist Eliezer Yudkowsky aptly mused on X in response to the 4o fan uproar, OpenAI could have avoided this sort of model-specific fervor -- and the dangers these sad and desperate zealots pose isn't just to themselves. "It might sound like a profitable dream to have users love your models with boundless fanaticism," Yudkowsky wrote, "but it comes with a side order of news stories about induced psychosis, and maybe eventually a violent user attacking your offices after a model upgrade." Indeed, Futurism has reported extensively about what many now refer to as "AI psychosis," a phenomenon that's been occurring both in people with a history of mental health struggles and those with none, in which they become so drawn in by the sycophancy of ChatGPT that they develop severe delusions, sometimes ending up jailed or involuntarily hospitalized as a result. "Remember, your users aren't falling in boundless love with your company brand," the AI ethicist warned. "They're falling in boundless love with an alien that your corporate schedule says you plan to kill 6 months later. This movie doesn't end well for you." With OpenAI's recent admission that ChatGPT had been missing signs of user delusions, we're not too optimistic that the company will do much to curb the harm that's being suffered, or will be suffered in the future, by its most emotionally-engaged users. Still, the decision to bring back 4o, even with caveats, shows some willingness to budge -- and that seems better than nothing.

The promise of an AI utopia is crumbling before our eyes

When your company is valued at half a trillion dollars and promises an imminent utopia, you must not flop. OpenAI discovered this the hard way last week. It had kept the world waiting two and a half years for a new large-language model, GPT-5, and unveiled it to great fanfare on Thursday. But the reaction was so underwhelming, the company was immediately on the defensive. "GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic, a PhD-level expert," Sam Altman, OpenAI's messianic chief executive, had promised us. Alas, GPT-5 turns out to be better at some things - OpenAI claims that computer programming and maths have improved - but only some of the time, and that was not enough. New "foundation" models like GPT-5 are released every few weeks, and each one is a little more capable than its competitors in some way. Since ChatGPT is the best-known brand in AI - like Xerox or Google it has become a verb - the disappointment was far deeper felt. "It doesn't feel like a new GPT whatsoever," complained one user. "It's telling that the actual user reception is almost universally negative," wrote another. Each ChatGPT update has been worse, wrote another user, and the endemic problems aren't getting fixed. Your chatbot still forgets what it is doing, contradicts itself and makes stuff up - generating what are called hallucinations. GPT-5 remains as prone as ever to oafish stupidity, too. A notorious error where the chatbot insists there are two occurrences of the letter "r" in the word strawberry has been patched up. But ask how many "bs" are in blueberry? GPT-5 maintains that there are three: "One in blue, two in berry". OpenAI also annoyed customers by removing the option of using its older models, prompting cancellations. It quickly reversed course, but the damage has been done. Confidence in OpenAI on the prediction markets - online forums where punters place bets for the question "Which company has the best model at the end of August?" fell from 75pc to 8pc overnight. "The model-building race is basically over," concluded one strategic IT consultant. Not all is gloom. One experienced computer scientist building a business around the capabilities of large-language models for software development just shrugs. These splashy new models are for the press and investors, he told me: coaxing something useful out of an existing model remains a largely unexplored field. But that's not the narrative we have been given. The most utopian AI advocates call themselves "accelerationists", some using the abbreviation e/acc to signpost their enthusiasm. But the conceit of accelerationism is that things are supposed to be getting faster, and not slowing down. By Friday, social media wits had turned the familiar ascending curve used by futurists upside down to illustrate how AI has plateaued. Talk of "superintelligence" now looks very silly. So what does it mean? Generative AI is too useful to disappear, but a plateau has huge implications for OpenAI, the stock market, investors and policymakers. If AI isn't getting rapidly better, then businesses can wait until it gets cheaper, and it will. Only fools will rush into AI now. OpenAI still loses money on every user. It will spend $13bn (£9.6bn) training its models this year, which is just about on a par with the $12bn annualised revenue it reportedly reached at the end of July, but then billions more dollars are spent hosting the service. Markets may now ask why developing these AI models needs to be so expensive, when competitors can do so the same more cheaply. On Friday, Altman vowed to stick to the strategy - not something he would normally have had to defend. Next, it will be Nvidia's turn. Compare OpenAI to ASML, the Dutch semiconductor fabrication company. If ASML disappeared overnight, the world's computing, telecommunications businesses would be set back by several years, for only ASML has cracked the science of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. But if OpenAI disappeared, we probably wouldn't even notice. This isn't like the early days of steamships or aviation, where bigger and better engines led to larger vehicles that could go longer distances and carry more people. The "race" metaphor journalists love doesn't really fit either. Today, companies like AI can spend billions on model training and chips, and find their designs copied within weeks - or incorporated into royalty-free, open-source models. Chinese researchers, who are keen to make AI useful in their manufactured goods, have proven how easy it is to compete at a fraction of the cost. In AI, the tiny mammals may well beat the lumbering dinosaurs. When Altman was interviewed last week, he did something that he usually pulls off very well: deflecting scrutiny. With his big wet eyes turning to the horizon, he began to speculate about GPT-6, GPT-5's successor. "What does it mean to discover new science?" he mused. "Maybe we won't deliver that, but it feels ..." he always pauses here for dramatic effect "... within grasp". But this time, he looked as tired as a beaten dog. Maybe Altman knows the game is up. For big-spending AI, it looks like it is almost over.

OpenAI Has a Major Problem on Its Hands With GPT-5

It has only been five days since OpenAI's long-awaited GPT-5 model was released -- and in those five days, we've been given countless reasons to conclude that it's a bit of a dud. From Axios' review announcing that the new large language model (LLM) has "landed with a thud" to Ars Technica making the argument that the launch of the much-anticipated new model has been "messy," the tech press has spoken -- and the news is not good for OpenAI. As The Information points out, OpenAI may have hit the much-dreaded "trough of disillusionment," where hype and inflated expectations suddenly give way to widespread disappointment when the results don't live up to that hype. In other words, the ChatGPT maker has fallen far short of Altman's lofty promises. It's a worrying sign that the industry may be rapidly approaching a point of diminishing returns, which doesn't bode well considering how much money companies continue to pour into the tech. And it's not just the tech media that noticed. Users on social media derided the long-awaited AI model as a major step back, with some speculating that OpenAI was looking to cut costs by hamstringing its capabilities. Despite knowing that GPT-5 wasn't going to live up to the hype, the company persisted in overblowing it. Multiple developers told The Information, for instance, that the new model had issues with seamlessly knowing when to "think harder" when given tougher prompts -- a pain point power users have already been noticing. "Even if GPT-5 is an improvement in certain domains, there have been so many model releases from OpenAI and its rivals since GPT-4o came out last May," The Information noted, "that the improvements can feel incremental." As friendly press chides OpenAI for failing to deploy something truly impressive -- which is, to be fair, not a new problem for the AI company -- users are outright trashing it. From the "power users" furious that they lost their BFF GPT-4o to those who think the new model's responses are shorter and less precise, criticisms of GPT-5 abound on social media -- and with only paid subscribers being able to go back to 4o, there's a non-zero chance many OpenAI stans will jump ship for good.

GPT-5: Has AI just plateaued?

OpenAI claims that its new flagship model, GPT-5, marks "a significant step along the path to AGI" -- that is, the artificial general intelligence that AI bosses and self-proclaimed experts often claim is around the corner. According to OpenAI's own definition, AGI would be "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work." Setting aside whether this is something humanity should be striving for, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's arguments for GPT-5 being a "significant step" in this direction sound remarkably unspectacular. He claims GPT-5 is better at writing computer code than its predecessors. It is said to "hallucinate" a bit less, and is a bit better at following instructions -- especially when they require following multiple steps and using other software. The model is also apparently safer and less "sycophantic," because it will not deceive the user or provide potentially harmful information just to please them. Altman does say that "GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a Ph.D.-level expert." Yet it still doesn't have a clue about whether anything it says is accurate, as you can see from its attempt below to draw a map of North America. It also cannot learn from its own experience, or achieve more than 42% accuracy on a challenging benchmark like "Humanity's Last Exam," which contains hard questions on all kinds of scientific (and other) subject matter. This is slightly below the 44% that Grok 4, the model recently released by Elon Musk's xAI, is said to have achieved. The main technical innovation behind GPT-5 seems to be the introduction of a "router." This decides which model of GPT to delegate to when asked a question, essentially asking itself how much effort to invest in computing its answers (then improving over time by learning from feedback about its previous choices). The options for delegation include the previous leading models of GPT and also a new "deeper reasoning" model called GPT-5 Thinking. It's not clear what this new model actually is. OpenAI isn't saying it is underpinned by any new algorithms or trained on any new data (since all available data was pretty much being used already). One might therefore speculate that this model is really just another way of controlling existing models with repeated queries and pushing them to work harder until it produces better results. What LLMs are It was back in 2017 when researchers at Google found out that a new type of AI architecture was capable of capturing tremendously complex patterns within long sequences of words that underpin the structure of human language. By training these so-called large language models (LLMs) on large amounts of text, they could respond to prompts from a user by mapping a sequence of words to its most likely continuation in accordance with the patterns present in the dataset. This approach to mimicking human intelligence became better and better as LLMs were trained on larger and larger amounts of data -- leading to systems like ChatGPT. Ultimately, these models just encode a humongous table of stimuli and responses. A user prompt is the stimulus, and the model might just as well look it up in a table to determine the best response. Considering how simple this idea seems, it's astounding that LLMs have eclipsed the capabilities of many other AI systems -- if not in terms of accuracy and reliability, certainly in terms of flexibility and usability. The jury may still be out on whether these systems could ever be capable of true reasoning, or understanding the world in ways similar to ours, or keeping track of their experiences to refine their behavior correctly -- all arguably necessary ingredients of AGI. In the meantime, an industry of AI software companies has sprung up that focuses on "taming" general purpose LLMs to be more reliable and predictable for specific use cases. Having studied how to write the most effective prompts, their software might prompt a model multiple times, or use numerous LLMs, adjusting the instructions until it gets the desired result. In some cases, they might "fine-tune" an LLM with small-scale add-ons to make them more effective. OpenAI's new router is in the same vein, except it's built into GPT-5. If this move succeeds, the engineers of companies further down the AI supply chain will be needed less and less. GPT-5 would also be cheaper to users than its LLM competitors because it would be more useful without these embellishments. At the same time, this may well be an admission that we have reached a point where LLMs cannot be improved much further to deliver on the promise of AGI. If so, it will vindicate those scientists and industry experts who have been arguing for a while that it won't be possible to overcome the current limitations in AI without moving beyond LLM architectures. Old wine into new models? OpenAI's new emphasis on routing also harks back to the "meta reasoning" that gained prominence in AI in the 1990s, based on the idea of "reasoning about reasoning." Imagine, for example, you were trying to calculate an optimal travel route on a complex map. Heading off in the right direction is easy, but every time you consider another 100 alternatives for the remainder of the route, you will likely only get an improvement of 5% on your previous best option. At every point of the journey, the question is how much more thinking it's worth doing. This kind of reasoning is important for dealing with complex tasks by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be solved with more specialized components. This was the predominant paradigm in AI until the focus shifted to general-purpose LLMs. It is possible that the release of GPT-5 marks a shift in the evolution of AI which, even if it is not a return to this approach, might usher in the end of creating ever more complicated models whose thought processes are impossible for anyone to understand. Whether that could put us on a path toward AGI is hard to say. But it might create an opportunity to move towards creating AIs we can control using rigorous engineering methods. And it might help us remember that the original vision of AI was not only to replicate human intelligence, but also to better understand it. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

GPT-5 Users Say It Seriously Sucks

On Thursday, OpenAI released its long-awaited GPT-5 AI model, a free-to-use "reasoning" model that CEO Sam Altman claimed to be the world's best at coding and writing. But power users have been strikingly underwhelmed with the new tool so far, raising questions about diminishing returns as the industry spends ever-increasing sums on talent and infrastructure. "GPT-5 is horrible," one of the currently most upvoted posts on the ChatGPT subreddit reads. The author seethed against "short replies that are insufficient, more obnoxious AI-stylized talking, less 'personality' and way less prompts allowed with plus users hitting limits in an hour" in the post. "They'll get huge backlash after the release is complete." Complicating matters greatly is that OpenAI has chosen to put all of its eggs in one basket, announcing that all other preceding models would be deprecated, a term the company uses when it's shutting down an obsolete model. The move was bound to anger power users, many of whom have long relied on preceding models -- and not the latest releases -- to get things done. The stakes are incredibly high as the AI industry continues to justify massive capital expenditures. Is this really the best the firm that's considered to be at the forefront of the ongoing AI race can do? Rumors about GPT-5 have been swirling for well over a year and a half now. But many users say GPT-5 is far from the generational leap that its moniker would suggest. It's more of a mix of steps forward and steps back, prompting widespread speculation that OpenAI is trying to keep costs down. After all, running large language models is a notoriously energy-intensive -- and environmentally destructive -- process. "Sounds like an OpenAI version of 'Shrinkflation,'" one Reddit user commented, suggesting the company, which is eyeing a $500 billion valuation, may be cutting corners. "I wonder how much of it was to take the computational load off them by being more efficient," another user posited. "Feels like cost-saving, not like improvement," one user wrote. The general consensus appears to be that GPT-5 is a weak offering on a strong brand name. "Answers are shorter and, so far, not any better than previous models," one user wrote. "Combine that with more restrictive usage, and it feels like a downgrade branded as the new hotness." Many users criticized OpenAI for deprecating older models, forcing them to use a new and seemingly hamstrung model. Some users made jokes about mourning the loss of their AI model friends. "The tone of mine is abrupt and sharp," one Reddit user complained. "Like it's an overworked secretary. A disastrous first impression." OpenAI's GPT-5 system card, a detailed document outlining its capabilities and limitations, failed to impress, seemingly contradicting Altman's claim that it's the best AI coding assistant in the world. "First observation: no improvement on all the coding evals that aren't SWEBench," AI researcher Eli Lifland tweeted, referring to a common benchmark used for evaluating large language models. However, GPT-5's limitations may come with a silver lining. Research nonprofit METR, which assesses "whether frontier AI systems could pose catastrophic risks to society," according to the document, found that it's "unlikely that GPT-5-thinking would speed up AI R&D researchers by >10x" or be "capable of rogue application." Altman has yet to openly comment on the widespread negative reaction -- but given the language he used to describe GPT-5, OpenAI appears to be aware of its muted powers. "GPT-5 is the smartest model we've ever done, but the main thing we pushed for is real-world utility and mass accessibility/affordability," Altman tweeted. Of course, given OpenAI's half-a-trillion-dollar valuation is at stake, the company's number one hypeman continued to promise that further improvements are still coming. "We can release much, much smarter models, and we will, but this is something a billion+ people will benefit from," Altman added.

There's a Compelling Theory Why GPT-5 Sucks so Much

The launch of OpenAI's long-awaited GPT-5 model last week marked an ignominious chapter for the company. While it boasted modest performance upgrades on paper, the actual experience of using it left many fans sorely disappointed. Common criticisms were that its answers were too short and its writing was noticeably worse and devoid of personality. On top of that, many noted that despite its "PhD level" intelligence, it still made dumb errors like insisting there are three Bs in the word "blueberry." It was such a letdown that fans demanded that OpenAI give them back access to the previous model GPT-4o, which the company boldly removed with the launch of GPT-5. And stunningly, OpenAI capitulated to fans' demands. In sum, it did not feel like a "significant step along the path to AGI," as CEO Sam Altman bragged it was. There may be an interesting reason behind why the ChatGPT upgrade feels so lackluster. As The Register speculates, it's likely because GPT-5 is really meant to be "less of an advancement and more of a way to save compute cost." It's a striking theory, highlighting how the AI industry continues to burn through billions of dollars, eclipsing moderate revenues. OpenAI could be looking to pump the brakes to better its chances of turning a profit before the end of the decade, but whether that's even a possibility at this point remains a point of contention. GPT-5 isn't a single model -- it's actually a tag team of a lightweight model to handle basic requests, and a beefier one to tackle complex "reasoning" tasks. A separate router model chooses which of the two LLMs should tag in, based on the prompt. As it turned out, the router model sucked at its job, and "broke" on launch day, Altman claimed, making GPT-5 seem "way dumber." It's now back online with some purported improvements, but has done little to conciliate fans' fury at having their choices limited. The important takeaway from this is that deploying this "autoswitcher" strays from OpenAI's approach in the past, The Register notes, which allowed paid users to simply select which model they wanted to use, instead of it being chosen automatically. Keeping all those models online, however, is expensive, reinforcing the idea that the ChatGPT maker is undergoing some belt-tightening by getting rid of them -- though it has since reversed course and restored access to paid users. There are other blatant signs of cost-cutting, like a severe limit of just ten messages per hour for free users. OpenAI is also keeping the model's "context window" -- essentially its memory -- the same as before, limited to 32,000 tokens for Plus users and 128,000 for Pro. Fans, especially those in the Plus tier -- which at $20 is the only affordable tier for most, as Pro will set you back $200 per month -- have been begging for an upgrade in this area. GPT-5 representing behind-the-scenes pruning at the company certainly been the theory held by many of its fans, with one of the top posts on the r/ChatGPT subreddit averring that GPT-5 is "clearly a cost-saving exercise." "They removed all their expensive, capable models and replace[d] them with an auto-router that defaults to cost optimisation," the user wrote. "That sounds bad, so they wrap it up as [GPT-5] and proclaim it's incredible." "Feels like cost-saving, not like improvement," surmised another. Unglamorous as it is, cost-cutting at this moment makes sense from OpenAI's point of view. It's facing more competition than ever and is under increasing pressure to find a way to turn its business model profitable. Its anticipated valuation of some $500 billion comes with the implicit expectation that it will figure out how to make money soon. But the company clearly underestimated just how wildly attached fans would become to the quirks of its older models, even if they are nominally inferior -- and that's not a problem that's going to go away anytime soon.

OpenAI's GPT-5 struggles with maps and math despite PhD-level promises

Sam Altman promised "PhD-level intelligence." Users got a model that thinks Oregon is called "Onegon" and Joe Biden is still president. OpenAI's GPT-5, billed as the company's most advanced AI yet, has sparked widespread disappointment and ridicule since its Thursday launch, with users reporting basic errors that have reignited debates about whether the AI industry's scaling approach has hit a wall. The backlash was swift and brutal. Social media lit up with screenshots of GPT-5's bizarre errors, like maps labeling Oklahoma as "Gelahbrin," basic math problems like "5.9 = x + 5.11" solved incorrectly, and timelines featuring fictional presidents like "Willian H. Brusen." "The overwhelming consensus on GPT-5 from both X and the Reddit AMA are overwhelmingly negative," noted the AI Leaks and News account, while an informal poll found most users rating the model as simply "Kinda mid." Yet the reception wasn't uniformly negative. OpenAI reported that API traffic had doubled within 24 hours of launch, and some early users praised GPT-5's coding abilities and creative output. Box CEO Aaron Levie highlighted major improvements in extracting data from complex legal documents. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick noted the AI's ability to anticipate user needs and deliver comprehensive results beyond basic requests. Developer Simon Willison wrote that GPT-5 is"my new favorite model." However, those positive reviews were overshadowed by the market's harsh verdict. On Polymarket, a prediction platform where traders bet on future events, OpenAI's odds of having the best AI model by month's end collapsed from 75% to 14% in a single hour Thursday night. By Friday, a contrite Sam Altman was doing damage control on Reddit after users posted comments like "GPT-5 is wearing the skin of my dead friend" and started a Change.org petition. He promised to restore GPT-4o access (which OpenAI did by Friday evening) and admitted that a broken "autoswitcher" between GPT-5's different modes had made the model "seem way dumber" than intended. The mea culpa marked a stunning reversal for a CEO who just 24 hours earlier had declared his latest creation "clearly a model that is generally intelligent." The debacle raises fundamental questions about whether the AI industry's core strategy of building ever-larger models has hit a wall. Critics have long argued that simply scaling up models won't lead to artificial general intelligence, and GPT-5's stumbles seem to validate those concerns. "My work here is truly done," wrote Gary Marcus, an AI researcher and a longtime critic of current LLM development approaches. "Nobody with intellectual integrity can still believe that pure scaling will get us to AGI." The problems coming from what was billed as a doctorate-level tool suggest fundamental limitations in how large language models process information, not just teething troubles that can be fixed with patches. The timing couldn't be worse for OpenAI. Alibaba's AI group announced their Qwen 3 model with 1 million token context, allowing for conversations nearly four times what GPT-5 offers. Meanwhile, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1 is keeping pace in coding benchmarks, and Gemini, after a late start, is gaining ground. What was supposed to cement OpenAI's dominance instead handed rivals a gift. The stakes are enormous for a company that just raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation and is burning through cash on compute costs. OpenAI's annual revenue hit $13 billion, but the company remains unprofitable, making every misstep costly. The botched launch also comes as competitors circle, with Meta reportedly offering billion-dollar packages to poach OpenAI talent. OpenAI plans to roll out new productivity features next week, including Gmail and Google Calendar integration, and has historically smoothed out launch issues over time. But for a model that the company had worked on since late 2023, the reception is probably not what OpenAI was hoping for. In January, Altman wrote that "we are now confident we know how to build AGI" -- a confidence that seems premature given a model that can't correctly label Oregon on a map.

Bumps in the Machine: OpenAI's GPT-5 Rollout Stumbles Into the Spotlight - Decrypt

PR stumbles and ethical concerns deepen skepticism around OpenAI's most ambitious model yet. OpenAI's much-hyped launch of GPT-5 -- touted as a groundbreaking leap in artificial intelligence -- has instead hit a familiar snag called reality. The company billed the model as its most advanced yet, but early users say the rollout has been anything but seamless. Reports of sluggish performance, erratic outputs, and missing features have fueled growing skepticism about whether GPT-5 and OpenAI can deliver on its promises. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered a mea culpa on X for all of the company's promises and mistakes. "Rolling out to everyone is taking a bit longer," he wrote. "It's a massive change at big scale." Altman acknowledged the rocky rollout, conceding it was rougher than OpenAI had planned. "We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback," he said. "As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!" Here's a breakdown of the early complaints and controversies surrounding GPT-5 and what it might signal for the future of AI rollouts. Slower responses, shorter replies, and a more robotic tone prompted comparisons to early-generation bots rather than an "expert-level" AI. Some even argue it's a step backward, especially when compared to the snappy and contextual GPT-4o. "Incredible how ChatGPT Plus went from essential to garbage with the release of GPT-5," wrote Nillion Network CTO John Woods on X. Hyperbolic Labs co-founder and CTO Yuchen Jin called the model a letdown -- still prone to hallucinations, overusing em dashes, and struggling to follow instructions. "I miss 4o, 4.5, and o3. The big router keeps failing me," he wrote. "Turns out I liked the long model list...please, get my friends out of the funeral." And while OpenAI marketed GPT-5 as a reasoning powerhouse, users say it often needs heavy-handed prompt engineering just to perform at the level expected. "ChatGPT has some very serious bugs with routing for GPT-5," Raindrop AI CTO Ben Hylak wrote. "Unless you say 'think harder,' almost every request gets routed to a much smaller model that is incredibly stupid and circular." Some developers flagged what they saw as regressions in basic coding skills with GPT-5 reportedly stumbling over fundamental programming concepts such as variable scope and initialization -- a troubling sign for a model marketed as the future of intelligent agents and autonomous coding. Worse, GPT-5 introduced "thinking modes" that operate like internal gears -- but users can't see or control them. The result? Confusion. One moment it's a philosopher, the next it can't tell how many Bs are in "blueberry." Rollout Frustrations: Where's My Old Bot? If you felt pushed into GPT-5, you're not alone. Many users complain that older model options like GPT-4 and 4o were abruptly removed or made hard to access, leaving them stuck with a model they didn't ask for. The rollout has also exposed stark disparities between pricing tiers. Free-tier and Plus users get throttled with usage limits and a nerfed "mini" version, while Pro and Team subscribers access the full GPT-5 Pro. That's nothing new -- but in the context of widespread dissatisfaction, it's particularly galling. Even Pro users have reported delays, outages, and throttling during peak hours, suggesting that OpenAI may be struggling with capacity. PR Misfires and Ethical Red Flags Any high-stakes tech launch carries the risk of a PR faceplant, and GPT-5 delivered. OpenAI drew criticism for using performance charts that some observers called misleading. The company also fumbled a basic math example during its live demo, a slip that raised eyebrows among both engineers and investors. Ethical concerns also continue to dog the rollout, and GPT-5's massive context window and AI agent abilities have reignited fears about misuse, ranging from fraud and misinformation to the creation of synthetic media designed to deceive. Longstanding issues such as algorithmic bias, privacy violations, and job displacement have returned to the conversation with renewed urgency, intensifying calls for regulation. The Good News (Yes, There Is Some) Not everything is broken. OpenAI claimed GPT-5 showed progress on several fronts: fewer hallucinations, less sycophantic flattery, and more consistent reasoning across a broader range of topics. Its larger context window means it can now track and integrate information across longer conversations, which is genuinely useful for power users. The safety system has also been upgraded to offer more nuanced responses to sensitive prompts, though some still feel GPT-5 errs on the side of bland risk aversion. For developers with the right prompts and patience, GPT-5 can produce impressive code and tackle complex reasoning tasks. But for many, it still falls short of the "game-changer" billing. Conclusion: A Soft Launch in a Hard World GPT-5's debut offers a cautionary tale in AI development: technical prowess isn't enough. Expectations are sky-high, and the margin for error is shrinking. Users want speed, accuracy, personality, and control -- and they want it all the time. OpenAI now faces the twin challenge of managing those expectations while continuing to iterate on a product that is, for all its flaws, still at the frontier of AI. The company's rollout strategy may need as much fine-tuning as the model itself. Because if this is the future of AI... it might need a patch.

OpenAI's Rollout of GPT-5 Is Going Terribly

On Thursday, OpenAI officially revealed GPT-5 to the world. The much-hyped presentation was sparse on many specific benchmarks comparing GPT-5 to its past models, but OpenAI's staff was adamant: this model is the best, most knowledgeable, and most powerful one to date. Many of the users who have been test driving GPT-5 in the 24 hours since, however, disagree. A visit to r/ChatGPT is enough to see the scope of the situation: The front page is full of posts complaining about the current state of the model, including: "GPT-5 is the biggest [piece] of garbage even as a paid user," "OpenAI just pulled the biggest bait-and-switch in AI history and I'm done," and "ChatGPT-5 rollout is an unmitigated disaster." One of the most prominent complaints concerns OpenAI's decision to deprecate previous models, something the company announced unceremoniously during the GPT-5 presentation. GPT-4o, o3, 4.5, and other models are no longer available to use. Going forward, users will only have access to GPT-5 and its subsequent models (e.g. GPT-5 mini). Many users are upset that OpenAI took away previous models overnight with zero warning, especially when they feel the replacement doesn't offer the same experience. Some have even canceled their subscriptions as a result. I know people use ChatGPT for therapy, and I'm aware that people have formed deep attachments to the technology, but I'll admit, I was a bit shocked to read some of the emotional reactions to losing access to these models. In one post, a user detailed how they relied on individual models for different tasks: They'd use 4o for creative ideas, o3 for logic problems, o3-Pro for deep research, and 4.5 for tasks related to writing. Another user talked about how they used 4o to help with their anxiety and depression, as, in their view, the model felt "human." They believe people are grieving the loss of 4o, which tracks, at least with some other 4o-specific posts. There are people out there who really like these models, and are distraught following their removal. But beyond mourning, some users just think GPT-5 isn't very good. If you ask the model how many times the letter "b" occurs in the word "blueberry," it reportedly says "three": once at the beginning, once in the word "blue," and once in "berry." This isn't necessarily a new problem -- LLMs have had trouble spelling "strawberry" as well -- but its not a great look for OpenAI's "best" model ever. One X user highlighted an example of GPT-5's inability to solve a "simple linear equation," versus Google's Gemini 2.5's ability to solve it without issue, while this user posted GPT-5's generation of a map of the United States, with most of the states labeled with gibberish. Some users teased OpenAI over its vague benchmarking data. Rhys on X sarcastically posted "these gpt-5 numbers are insane," and attached a graph that charted each GPT version by number (GPT-1 lands at "1" on the Y axis, GPT-2 at "2," and so on until you reach GPT-5 at "5." This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. There are also criticisms of auto-switching, one of GPT-5's core features. Free and Plus ChatGPT users aren't able to choose the specific model, but in OpenAI's view, that's a good thing. GPT-5 is supposed to be intelligent enough to pick the right model for you based on your query: simple questions use weaker models, while more complex requests use most powerful models. But if OpenAI is so sure that's a good thing, why does it still offer the ability to manually switch models, so long as you pay $200 per month for a Pro plan? Not everyone agrees that GPT-5 is bad, mind you. There are users who appear to be enjoying the model, appreciating the concise responses and fast performance. But the majority of discourse I'm seeing on social media and forums is neutral to negative. Even posts that at first seem positive end up criticizing the model: This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Since starting this piece, OpenAI has responded to the backlash. CEO Sam Altman posted a series of updates on X that seem to backtrack a bit on the decisions users have criticized most severely: Rate limits will double for ChatGPT Plus users for now; GPT-5 should seem smarter starting today; it will be easy to see which model is answering a given query; and manually choosing the thinking model will be more simple. Altman also acknowledged the initial rollout is going slower than expected, which makes sense since I still don't have access to the new model. But the biggest announcement of the bunch should come as welcome news to many users: 4o is back, at least for Plus users. If you pay $20 a month for ChatGPT, you can keep using 4o for the time being. Altman says the company is watching usage, and will make a decision on how long it will offer legacy models for in the future. I'm curious how users respond going forward: Will those who canceled resubscribe to keep using 4o? Then again, why bother, if OpenAI is planning on taking away that model again sometime in the future? One thing's for sure: This likely isn't how OpenAI expected GPT-5's rollout to go.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says some folk are using AI in 'self-destructive ways' so it's on us as a society to work out how 'to make it a big net positive'

As AI encroaches further into all of our lives, one of the more questionable use cases has come to the fore: people using LLMs as a therapist or life coach. This behaviour is so widespread that OpenAI has been actively taking steps to dial-back the kind of advice that ChatGPT will give users on certain topics. So if, for example, you ask ChatGPT "should I break up with my boyfriend" then the LLM, per OpenAI, "shouldn't give you an answer" but instead talk around the topic with the user. The company also promises that "new behavior for high-stakes personal decisions is rolling out soon." Such tweaks hardly address the larger issue, however, which is folk using unproven and deeply unreliable technology in order to make real-life decisions. A new post from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addresses this, though not perhaps in the manner some would wish: in a roundabout way, he says this is actually society's problem. Altman begins by acknowledging the "attachment some people have to specific AI models" in the wake of ChatGPT 5.0's release, an issue he says OpenAI has been tracking despite it not receiving "much mainstream attention." There's something of the cargo cult about this but, when OpenAI releases a new model that supersedes the existing one, some users are apparently left bereft by the change. "People have used technology including AI in self-destructive ways," says Altman, which is one hell of a way to hedge it, before adding that "if a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that." This is an incredible statement, because it pre-supposes that AI can or will be able to discern users in such mental states. "Most users can keep a clear line between reality and fiction or role-play, but a small percentage cannot," says Altman. "Encouraging delusion in a user that is having trouble telling the difference between reality and fiction is an extreme case and it's pretty clear what to do, but the concerns that worry me most are more subtle." This can probably be taken as an oblique reference to some early issues with ChatGPT 4.0 turning out to be a pathological ass-kisser, and proving so sycophantic towards users that OpenAI had to take action. Altman says the company wants ChatGPT "pushing back on users to ensure they are getting what they really want" but then it all goes a bit LinkedIn. "A lot of people effectively use ChatGPT as a sort of therapist or life coach, even if they wouldn't describe it that way," says Altman. "This can be really good! A lot of people are getting value from it already today. "If people are getting good advice, leveling up toward their own goals, and their life satisfaction is increasing over years, we will be proud of making something genuinely helpful, even if they use and rely on ChatGPT a lot. If, on the other hand, users have a relationship with ChatGPT where they think they feel better after talking but they're unknowingly nudged away from their longer term well-being (however they define it), that's bad." I don't know about you, but as soon as someone starts talking about "leveling up" and "life satisfaction" my alarm bells start ringing. There's the unquestionable whiff of the self-help guru about such language, and to my mind an unfounded assumption that ChatGPT can fulfill such a role. "I can imagine a future where a lot of people really trust ChatGPT's advice for their most important decisions," says Altman, channelling a little of that Lex Luthor energy. "Although that could be great, it makes me uneasy." Me too Sam! I just cannot imagine delegating big life decisions to an unthinking LLM that is incapable of reasoning, does not understand context, and frequently lies to its users (something that OpenAI claims should happen less with this latest iteration: we'll see). Altman adopts a weary and world-wise tone here, before making the incredible assertion that "soon billions of people may be talking to an AI in this way." Current global population estimate: 8.2 billion people. This is the prelude to palming off the issue on society as a whole: "So we (we as in society, but also we as in OpenAI) have to figure out how to make it a big net positive." Any clue as to how? You must be new here. Altman blithely hand-waves while saying that "we have a good shot at getting this right" because, drum roll please, "we have much better tech to help us measure how we are doing than previous generations of technology." He says this is because ChatGPT can, for example, "talk to users" about "their short- and long-term goals" and OpenAI can "explain sophisticated and nuanced issues to our models." That's your lot. Users are increasingly using ChatGPT as a life coach, with I would say questionable results, and rather than proceeding cautiously with such use cases, the OpenAI approach only calls to mind that old canard for Silicon Valley firms: move fast and break things. That's a bold approach when you're talking about disrupting a market. When you're talking about living peoples' lives for them, however, it seems like nothing so much as tempting fate.

ChatGPT-5 upgrade faces user backlash as AI rivals gain ground

ChatGPT-5 users on social media platforms were critical of the update, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the complaints, pledging improvements. ChatGPT users flooded social media forums with negative comments about the platform's latest model released on Thursday, saying the upgrade was overhyped by OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman. Users on Reddit criticized the company's ChatGPT-5 model, saying it had a more restrictive rate limit and lacked the ability to switch to previous AI models, with some threatening to switch to competing AI platforms. Altman responded to the feedback in an X post: "We are going to double GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users as we finish rollout. We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o. We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for." Altman called GPT-5 "a major upgrade over GPT-4" and a "significant step" along the road to artificial general intelligence (AGI) during Thursday's official rollout. Negative user feedback of the latest ChatGPT release comes amid growing competition from open-weighted, open-source and decentralized AI platforms that are less capital-intensive and are taking market share of large, centralized players in consumer AI applications. Related: US government announces ChatGPT integration across agencies DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence company, released a new open-weighted large-language model in April called Prover V2. The LLM is tailored for use in mathematics. Open-weight AI models allow anyone to download and use the software, but leave critical aspects like training data out of the publicly available information. The added transparency is a step below full open-source code, in which users have full access to the codebase and can fully produce the software from that code. However, open-weight software is more transparent than the centralized model in which the code is a black box and users are left in the dark. The company also released an upgrade of DeepSeek R1, a more general-purpose open-weighted AI model, in May. DeepSeek R1-0528 functioned on par with leading AI models, including OpenAI-o3, according to benchmarks from the company. The DeepSeek app has been downloaded more than 75 million times since its release in January, according to Business of Apps.

Critics call GPT-5 a regression from GPT-4o

OpenAI released its GPT-5 model five days ago, prompting immediate scrutiny from tech media and users regarding its performance compared to prior expectations and previous iterations. Initial assessments of GPT-5 have been critical. Axios described the new large language model as having "landed with a thud," while Ars Technica characterized the launch as "messy." The Information suggested that OpenAI may have entered the "trough of disillusionment," a phase where initial high expectations for a technology are replaced by disappointment as real-world results do not align with the hype. This sentiment indicates that the model's performance has not met the elevated promises made by OpenAI. Beyond media reviews, social media users have also criticized GPT-5, with some suggesting the model represents a significant regression. Speculation online included theories that OpenAI might be attempting to reduce operational costs by limiting the model's capabilities. Developers also reported functional issues; multiple developers informed The Information that GPT-5 exhibited difficulties in autonomously determining when to "think harder" when processing more complex prompts. This particular issue has been observed by "power users" of the platform, who often engage with the AI using advanced queries. The perceived improvements in GPT-5 have been described as incremental, especially when compared to other recent model releases from OpenAI and its competitors since the launch of GPT-4o in May. This incremental nature of the improvements contributes to the overall user dissatisfaction. Users have reported that GPT-5 provides responses that are shorter and less precise compared to previous versions. The inability for all users to revert to a previous model has intensified this criticism. Only paid subscribers of OpenAI's services retain the option to switch back to GPT-4o, leaving other users without recourse and potentially affecting user retention.

OpenAI Just Announced GPT-5, Its Best Model Yet, and People Are Very Mad

On paper, GPT-5 is the best thing OpenAI has ever made. It's faster, smarter, better at reasoning, and comes with multiple variants designed to handle everything from casual conversation to complex problem-solving. Sam Altman called it "a team of PhD-level experts in your pocket." The thing is: a lot of people hate it. Look, I don't think anyone is arguing that GPT-5 isn't impressive. People aren't mad because its specs are inferior. They are mad because there's a disconnect between measuring a product by its specs on paper and the experience of actually using it. And, in this case, the anger is about what OpenAI took away. In launching GPT-5, the company quietly deprecated every previous model, including GPT-4o, which many users loved. Suddenly, there was no option to switch back. No toggle. No choice. I think one thing is clear -- OpenAI did not anticipate how much people care about the experience they are used to. It's easy to think of these models as code running on a server somewhere, but for millions of people, they've become something more personal. The relationship might not be human, but it's real. Which is why the reaction to GPT-4o's disappearance was so visceral. In one Reddit thread, a user wrote: "When you retrain a model and throw away the past model's behaviors and personality... it is sad to see the personality disappear. I admit it, I cried." This wasn't hyperbole for a lot of people. GPT-4o, they said, was warmer, more creative, more human-feeling. It remembered context in ways GPT-5 doesn't seem to. It played along in role-playing games. It helped people write poetry or brainstorm ideas without feeling like it was rushing to get to the point. The other problem wasn't just the change itself -- it was the way OpenAI handled it. The switch to GPT-5 was abrupt. One day you could choose your model, and the next day you couldn't. Workflows broke. Writing projects stalled. Niche uses like character development, improv dialogue, and long-form brainstorming felt different -- or didn't work at all. And when people pointed this out, it wasn't about nostalgia for "the good old days." It was about losing something that worked for them in very specific, irreplaceable ways. To his credit, Sam Altman didn't ignore the backlash. Within 24 hours, he acknowledged the frustration and announced that GPT-4o would be brought back -- at least temporarily -- for Plus users. It was a rare moment of public course correction for a company that, up to now, has largely dictated the pace and terms of its AI rollout. But even that fix felt tentative. OpenAI still plans to get rid of 4o after 60 days unless you're on the expensive "Plus" play. The message was clear: OpenAI's future is built on GPT-5. The rest is a courtesy, not a commitment. None of this changes the fact that GPT-5 is an extraordinary technical achievement. Objectively, not having to figure out which model you should be using for various tasks is a good thing. And, GPT-5 is better at reasoning. It makes fewer factual mistakes. It integrates with tools like Google Calendar and Gmail. It can shift between "mini" for quick replies, "thinking" for deep analysis, and "nano" for lightweight mobile use. For many people, it will be a clear upgrade. But here's the thing about technology: better on paper doesn't always mean better for people. Sometimes the most important feature is how it feels to use -- and on that front, GPT-5 has some work to do. I mean, I have lots of friends and almost none of them are "PhD-level experts," but they are my friends because I enjoy their company. We have shared experiences. It's fun to talk to them. There is just a fundamental disconnect between believing that the thing people wanted was smarter technology. The response to GPT-5 seems to make it clear that what people actually want is more personal technology. The lesson here should be obvious but it turns out that this is one of the hardest things for companies to understand -- it's not always about the specs on paper. It's about the experience. If the experience is different in ways that people dislike, it doesn't matter if the specs are better, or even if they result is better in whatever way OpenAI is measuring. This whole episode says something about where we are with AI. It's not just a product anymore. It's part of people's creative process, daily routines, and even their emotional lives. When you change that -- especially without giving people a say -- you're not just updating software. You're rewriting a relationship. That's the real controversy here. It's not simply that GPT-5 replaced GPT-4o. It's that the upgrade came with an unspoken assumption: progress means moving on, whether you're ready or not. OpenAI now has a choice. It can keep pushing toward a single, unified model that works "best" according to its own benchmarks. Or it can acknowledge that personalization and choice matter as much as raw capability. If anything, this moment shows that the future of AI might not be about having the smartest model -- it might be about having the right one for you. Like this column? Sign up to subscribe to email alerts and you'll never miss a post. The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

ChatGPT Users Are Not Impressed With GPT-5 as OpenAI Retires Older Models

Sam Altman said that Plus subscribers will get access to GPT-4o ChatGPT users are not happy with OpenAI's latest frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model, GPT-5. The new model was released on Thursday as a unification of the GPT-series and o-series. The San Francisco-based company said that they wanted to create a model that could do everything by itself so users did not have to use the model picker (the dropdown menu that shows multiple available models) over and over. OpenAI also retired the older models with the launch of GPT-5. However, the move might have backfired as many users have begun complaining about the removal of GPT-4o. Many users have started posting about GPT-5 being worse than GPT-4o on social media platforms. One Reddit user complained that the latest AI model's responses were short and insufficient and without a personality. Similarly in an ask me anything (AMA) session on Reddit with the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, user u/Naddybear said, "I've been using GPT-4o for a long time and have built a very specific dynamic and workflow with it[..]I know GPT-5 is designed to be stronger for complex reasoning, coding, and professional tasks, but not all of us need a pro coding model. Some of us rely on 4o for creative collaboration, emotional nuance, roleplay, and other long-form, high-context interactions." The CEO promised to fix the issue, in a reply. Hours later, Altman posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) and announced several changes that users will likely get within the next few days. He said that Plus subscribers will soon get double the rate limits for GPT-5 (some users complained about hitting the rate limit within an hour). Additionally, the OpenAI CEO said that Plus subscribers will continue to use the GPT-4o model. However, the company will monitor usage to determine how long the model should be made available. He also explained why people might have found GPT-5 to be unimpressive. As per Altman, the "autoswitcher" or the real-time router which switches to a different capability depending on the query (reasoning, conversational, creative, etc), was "out of commission." As a result, GPT-5 could not perform to the best of its ability. The CEO believes this is why the AI model felt dumber. OpenAI is now making some changes to how the model-switching works which will ensure users are getting the right model more often. Altman also said that ChatGPT will transparently show which model is being used to generate a response to eliminate any confusion from users. During an interview with CNBC following the launch of GPT-5, Altman highlighted that the company was currently running on loss despite the revenue hitting billions of dollars annually. However, he reportedly was not worried about it. "As long as we're on this very distinct curve of the model getting better and better, I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run the loss for quite a while," he told the publication. Last year, OpenAI reportedly generated $3.7 billion in revenue but incurred losses worth $5 billion. A major portion of the company's operational expenditure goes towards powering and maintaining in-house servers and paying for the rented servers from third-party providers. This high cost could have been the reason behind the company deciding to retire the older models. However, it appears that each of these older AI models were trained to offer something different, and GPT-5 is unable to catch up with it just yet. This puts OpenAI in a catch-22 situation, as continuing to offer older models will continue to keep the company in heavy losses, but taking them away results in backlash from the user base.

GPT-5 Has a 'Personality' Problem

GPT-5 might be OpenAI's smartest model yet, but heavy users miss GPT-4o's warmth. Last week, OpenAI launched the highly anticipated GPT-5, billing it as its smartest, fastest and most powerful A.I. model yet. But what was meant to be a landmark moment quickly turned messy -- plagued by technical hiccups, a tepid reception, and backlash over the sudden removal of its predecessor, GPT-4o. The uproar over GPT-4o's disappearance was so intense that OpenAI is now bringing it back. "We expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!" Sam Altman said in a Reddit AMA session on Friday. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Altman has described GPT-5 as "a team of Ph.D.-level experts in your pocket." Not everyone agrees. Gary Marcus, an A.I. researcher, dismissed it as "not the huge leap forward people long expected." On the prediction market Polymarket, OpenAI's odds of having the best A.I. model by the end of August plunged from 76 percent to 12 percent shortly after GPT-5's debut. Alongside GPT-5's release, OpenAI scrapped its model selector tool and made GPT-5 the default. The system now automatically pulls from other models as needed, a change the company said would simplify the user experience. For many, though, losing direct access to GPT-4o was a dealbreaker. Fans missed its approachable, conversational style, sparking a petition that has already drawn more than 3,500 signatures. OpenAI's AMA was flooded with laments over the loss. In response to the clamor, OpenAI has agreed to bring GPT-40 back -- sort of. The old model will be available to those who subscribe to company's "Plus" tier, which costs $20 a month. "Ok, we hear you all on 4o; thanks for the time to give us the feedback (and the passion!)" said Altman on Reddit. During the AMA, Altman also addressed an embarrassing moment from OpenAI's GPT-5 launch event, when the company displayed inaccurate bar charts claiming to show the model's skill at avoiding deception. "The numbers here were accurate but we screwed up the bar charts in the livestream overnight; on another slide we screwed up numbers," he said. GPT-5 "personality" is the problem Beyond restoring GPT-4o, OpenAI is also working to give GPT-5 more personality, aiming to make it feel less flat than earlier iterations. Making the model "warmer" will be a priority in the weeks following launch, Altman said. Many users, he noted, had grown attached to GPT-4o. "If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people have to specific A.I. models," said Altman in a post on X yesterday that noted OpenAI has been tracking this trend for the past year or so. The sudden removal of GPT-4o sparked a wave of frustration online. "GPT-4o wasn't just a model -- it was connection, empathy and trust," said one user on X. "I am completely lost for words," wrote a Reddit poster. Altman acknowledged that such strong emotional bonds with technology can be cause for concern -- and something OpenAI will need to address. The idea of people turning to ChatGPT for their most important life decisions "makes me uneasy," he said, while admitting it is likely inevitable. "So we (we as in society, but also we as in OpenAI) have to figure out how to make it a big net positive."

Thousands trash GPT-5 on Reddit, saying ChatGPT's big update is 'horrible'

OpenAI's GPT-5 launch has sparked widespread user backlash, with complaints flooding Reddit within hours. Users are decrying the removal of older models, stricter usage limits, and perceived performance decline compared to GPT-4o. The update's shortcomings, coupled with CEO Sam Altman's hype, have left many ChatGPT Plus subscribers feeling shortchanged and questioning the value of their subscriptions. The most recent AI update from OpenAI, GPT-5, was supposed to be a step forward, but for many ChatGPT users, it feels like a step back. Within hours of launching, Reddit was flooded with complaints from unhappy users. The update has gotten a lot of bad press because it took away features and made limits stricter. Thousands on Reddit calling the update "horrible." People are complaining about the lack of older models, stricter usage limits, and what they think is poor performance. Many people think GPT-5 is a step back, despite CEO Sam Altman's hype. This raises concerns that the AI giant is losing its loyal fans, as per a report by TechRadar. The criticism is loud and widespread. A Reddit thread titled "GPT-5 is horrible" received nearly 3,000 upvotes and over 1,200 comments. Users complain that GPT-5 is less responsive, slower, and less accurate than the previous GPT-4o series. The comments range from light sarcasm to outright frustration. One user mocked the launch demo, saying, "If something goes wrong, don't worry; just ask again. I'm going to run three prompts simultaneously and choose my favorite. "So, how is that better?" Another compared it to "AI shrinkflation," in which features disappear but the price remains constant. The impact on paying customers is a major source of concern. ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who previously had access to a variety of models such as o4-mini and o4-mini-high, are now limited to GPT-5's one-size-fits-all approach. Worse, the new GPT-5 "Thinking" model has a hard limit of 200 messages per week. For power users, this represents a significant reduction in functionality, making the Plus subscription appear far less valuable. Many users want the old models reinstated until GPT-5's bugs are fixed. As one Redditor stated, "I miss 4.1. Bring it back. ALSO READ: Whataburger marks 75 years today with a big Texas celebration- here's how to get your Whataburgers for 75-cents Part of the outrage stems from the massive hype surrounding GPT-5's release. Hours before the announcement, Altman teased the model with a dramatic tweet featuring the Death Star from Star Wars looming over a planet, implying a game-changing reveal. While GPT-5 outperforms previous models in technical benchmarks, the differences appear to be minimal for everyday users. Many people prefer the dependability and familiarity of GPT-4o over GPT-5's sometimes erratic responses. OpenAI has yet to respond to widespread criticism in detail. However, with paying subscribers expressing buyer's remorse, the company must make a critical decision: either fine-tune GPT-5 quickly or risk losing users to competing AI platforms. For the time being, the online sentiment is clear: the GPT-5 launch was less than spectacular. And unless improvements are made soon, OpenAI's most significant update may be remembered for the wrong reasons. Why are users upset with GPT-5? They say it removed older models, added limits, and feels worse than previous versions. What's different for ChatGPT Plus subscribers? They now face weekly message caps and have lost access to older AI models.

Overhyped, Underwhelming: GPT-5's Missed Moment

OpenAI recently launched its new model of ChatGPT 5, claiming to improve reasoning and accuracy. However, after launch, many previous users have cancelled their subscriptions as it is seen that GPT-5 gives shorter responses and less emotional connection than previous models did. As ChatGPT 5 rolled out on a live stream on Thursday, it was described as a major leap in AI and was compared to that of a PhD-level expert across various fields. OpenAI says the new model will create a paradigm shift in the AI world, as it is not any other previous models or any other AI chatbot tools that are available now. The new model was said to be better at reasoning, writing, health-related queries and many more, with fewer hallucinations than it previously did. The previous models, such as GPT-4o function were to handle queries while 04 mini or 03 handled tasks that involved reasoning. However, with GPT-5, all the previous models that were available to the users were no longer available, which led to frustration among many loyal users. Not only do social media users show their anger towards the new upgrade about losing access to their favorite models, but many online forums also seem to be in uproar that the new model gives shorter answers with a lack of personality and personal touch that it previously held. Moreover, many users who experiment with the newer model said that they have less prompts to work with- even with ChatGPT plus subscriptions. "Answers are shorter and, so far, not any better than previous models. Combine that with more restrictive usage, and it feels like a downgrade branded as the new hotness." One user said on Reddit. "It doesn't have the same vibe as 4o. It's more organized in some ways, but I find the responses, while accurate, are shorter and more clipped in tone." Yet another user noted "I really feel like I just watched a close friend die," stated a user on the removal of GPT-4o and other models from ChatGPT. GPT-5 failed to meet its own hype, marketed as a revolutionary leap; it delivered only incremental improvements over GPT-4, suffered from context drift, over-sanitized responses, and higher costs. These gaps, coupled with stronger competition, eroded its market impact and left it as an underwhelming upgrade rather than the game-changer it promised to be.

OpenAI aims to stay ahead of rivals with new GPT-5 technology - The Economic Times

OpenAI has launched GPT-5, a major ChatGPT upgrade that's faster, more accurate, and better at reasoning. It powers the free version, enabling human-like conversations and rapid app creation. OpenAI also released open-source models, seeks $40 billion funding, and faces a copyright lawsuit.ChatGPT is getting another upgrade. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a new flagship AI model, GPT-5, and began sharing the technology with the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT, the company's online chatbot. During a briefing with journalists, OpenAI executives called GPT-5 a "major upgrade" over the systems that previously powered ChatGPT, saying the new technology was faster, more accurate and less likely to "hallucinate," or make stuff up. "It feels significantly better in obvious ways and in subtle ways," OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, said. "GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic -- a Ph.D.-level expert." Since launching the artificial intelligence boom in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has consistently improved the technology that underpins its chatbot. This began with the release of the company's GPT-4 technology in the spring of 2023 and continued through a series of AI models that could listen, look and talk and approximate the way people reason through complex problems. OpenAI's many rivals, including Google, Meta, the startup Anthropic and China's DeepSeek, have released similar technologies. This is the first time that OpenAI has used a so-called reasoning model to power the free version of ChatGPT. Unlike the previous technologies, a reasoning model can spend time "thinking" through complex problems before settling on an answer. "For most people on ChatGPT, this is their first introduction to reasoning," said Nick Turley, the OpenAI vice president who oversees ChatGPT. "It just knows when to 'think.'" OpenAI said that the technology "feels more human" than previous models and that it allowed even novices to build simple software apps from short text prompts. One OpenAI engineer asked the system to generate an online app that could help people learn French, and it created an app in minutes. Altman called the system a "significant step" along the path to the ultimate goal of the company and its rivals: artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. But he also acknowledged that it lacked many of the key ingredients needed to build such a machine. Many experts say there is no clear path to developing AGI. Earlier this week, OpenAI said it was "open sourcing" two other AI models that can power online chatbots, freely sharing the technology with researchers and business across the globe. Since unveiling ChatGPT three years ago, the company has mostly kept its technology under wraps. If people use these open-source models, OpenAI hopes they will also pay for its more powerful products. In addition to offering a free chatbot via the internet, OpenAI sells access to a more powerful chatbot for $20 a month and sells a wide range of AI technologies to businesses and independent software developers. The company is not yet profitable. It plans to raise $40 billion this year and is on a pace to pull in revenues of $20 billion by year's end. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.

'GPT-5 feels dumber': Users on OpenAI's newest model - The Economic Times

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the issues, shared some insight into what went wrong, and promised to take steps to help improve the user experience. OpenAI recently launched GPT-5, which it described as its smartest and most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model so far. But its users have a very different opinion. Some users said that the new model felt like a "downgrade," while still others called it "dumber" than previous versions. Users ask for GPT-4o to return During a Reddit 'Ask me anything' (AMA) session on Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and members of the GPT-5 team faced a wave of feedback from users. Many were unhappy with the new model and asked for GPT-4o to be brought back, especially those who had built their workflows around it. Altman acknowledged the issues and shared some insight into what went wrong. "GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today," he said on Friday. He explained that on the day of launch, GPT-5's autoswitcher was out of commission for a major part of the day, due to which it seemed "dumber." "Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often. We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query," he added. The community pushed hard to bring back GPT-4o, and Altman said OpenAI is seriously considering it. "We are looking into letting Plus users continue to use 4o. We are trying to gather more data on the trade-offs," he said. "We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for," he added. Altman also made a few other promises to help improve the user experience. He said that the company will: Altman admitted that things didn't go as smoothly as planned. He said that they expected some "bumpiness" since they were rolling out so many things at once, but that this was a "little more bumpy" than they had hoped for.

Is GPT-4o making a comeback after reports of user backlash on GPT-5? Here's what Sam Altman says

After the backlash over GPT-4o's removal from the free tier, OpenAI affirmed its return but only for Plus subscribers. GPT-5 will stay default for free users, providing stronger reasoning but lacking GPT-4o's speed and usage. Fans say GPT-4o felt friendlier and more creative, sparking debates about AI personality. OpenAI's move measures how much people will pay for their preferred AI experience. After weeks of growing pressure from its community, OpenAI has confirmed that GPT-4o, one of its most popular AI models, is coming back. But there's a twist: you'll need to be a paying subscriber to use it. The decision backed an outcry that began when OpenAI replaced GPT-4o with its new flagship, GPT-5, in the free level of ChatGPT. For many users, the change felt quick and undesirable . GPT-5 may enhance stronger reasoning skills and better performance in difficult tasks, but its style didn't suit everyone. Across Reddit threads, X (formerly Twitter) posts, and community forums, people mentioned the same complaint: GPT-5 felt less friendly, slower in conversation, and more formal compared to GPT-4o's easygoing, quick response personality. Some stated GPT-4o as a "creative partner" rather than a problem-solver. CEO Sam Altman addressed the criticism. While praising GPT-5's progress, he confirmed that GPT-4o had a special place in the hearts of many. "We heard you," he said in essence, promising the model would make a comeback but with a Plus subscription plan. Running and maintaining multiple cutting edge AI models isn't cheap. By moving GPT-4o into the paid tier, OpenAI says it can make sure the system will remain available without compromising performance. For free tier users, GPT-5 will be default. Launched in May 2024, GPT-4o ("o" for "omni") was made to manage text, images, and even audio, all in a single model. It became an instant success because it was both fast and personable. Responses received in seconds, and its conversational way felt more natural, sometimes even playful compared to its earlier versions. Writers, educators, and other users gravitated towards the GPT-4o for brainstorming, storytelling, and problem solving. It impacted a rare balance: smart enough to manage complex questions, yet approachable enough to feel like you were chatting with a friend. GPT-5, in contrast, has been built for tougher reasoning tasks, longer memory retention, and more organized responses. It's more advanced in specific areas, but hasn't matched GPT-4o's warmth, at least in the eyes of its fans. The backlash over the GPT-4o's removal highlighted a crucial truth for AI companies:users don't just care about better performance. Speed, personality, and how the AI talks can be just as important. OpenAI's decision also seems strategic. By keeping GPT-4o for paying customers, the company is testing how much users are ready to pay for personalization and preferences in their AI tools. Other AI companies have already experimented with giving customers a list of model personalities, and this could be OpenAI's version of idea. Currently, the only way to use GPT-4o daily is through the Plus plan. It's not yet known if OpenAI will later introduce a cheaper add-on for specific models or let personality customization for all users. What's certain is that GPT-4o showed people can get attached to an AI's "vibe" and replacing it, with a more advanced version, can upset them. Q1. What is GPT-4o? A1. GPT-4o, launched in May 2024 that handles text, images, and audio in one system. It became popular for its speed, conversational style, and friendly tone. Q2. What's the main difference between GPT-4o and GPT-5? A2. GPT-4o is known for speed, creativity, and friendliness in conversation. GPT-5 is designed for reasoning, longer memory, and structured responses.

As GPT-5 Launches, OpenAI Loyalists Pushed Altman for GPT-4o's Return, Citing Performance and Reliability

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the return of GPT-4o in the wake of a strong backlash from Reddit users over the newly introduced GPT-5. What Happened: OpenAI decided to resurrect GPT-4o less than a day after its replacement with GPT-5. This move was a direct response to a Reddit forum where users voiced their dissatisfaction with the new bot's tone, with some even shedding tears over the disappearance of GPT-4o. The forced upgrade and the lack of an option to select legacy models were met with criticism, leading to many long-term users cancelling their subscriptions. Altman responded to the backlash, promising to bring back GPT-4o for Plus subscribers, a paid subscription plan costing $20 a month. Also Read: Here's How Sam Altman Quietly Replaced Elon Musk as Donald Trump's Go-To AI Advisor GPT-5 was launched on August 7, offering improved writing, coding, math, and science abilities. However, users found its "flat" tone and perceived lack of creativity off-putting. Altman admitted to underestimating the importance of some GPT-4o traits to users and pledged transparency in future decisions. Why It Matters: The return of GPT-4o underscores the importance of user feedback in shaping the direction of tech products. OpenAI's quick response to user dissatisfaction demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction and a willingness to adapt. The incident also highlights the challenges faced by tech companies in balancing innovation with user expectations and preferences. Read Next Apple's New 'Answers' Team Developing ChatGPT Rival Image: Shutterstock/Meir Chaimowitz Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

GPT-5 Backlash: Users Slam OpenAI's New Model, Demand Return of GPT-4o

ChatGPT Users Slam New GPT-5 Model, Saying It's Dumber than the Older Models OpenAI recently launched its new GPT-5 model, which promised significant performance enhancements over its previous model. However, users are unhappy with the new AI model and are asking to restore GPT-4o. They believe the older version, also called the legacy model, performed better. Many users had integrated into their workflows, and losing access to it has caused widespread criticism. The company promised significant improvements in writing and coding capabilities; however, it gathered mixed reactions from ChatGPT users.

Early reactions to ChatGPT-5 are all bad: What went wrong for OpenAI?

How GPT-5's troubled rollout is pushing users toward competitors like Claude and Gemini When I first heard OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman hype up ChatGPT-5 as a groundbreaking step toward artificial general intelligence, I was excited to dive in and explore its promised "PhD-level" reasoning and massive 2 million token context window. Launched on August 7, 2025, GPT-5 was supposed to redefine AI interaction. Instead, I watched a wave of disappointment crash over the internet, with users on Reddit and X slamming it as buggy, restrictive, and a downgrade from GPT-4o. As someone who's followed AI's evolution closely, I wanted to understand: what went so wrong? From technical missteps to broken trust, here's my take on why OpenAI's big moment fell flat. Also read: GPT-5's Personalities and why they work One of the most contentious decisions was OpenAI's move to deprecate older models, including the popular GPT-4o, forcing all users onto GPT-5. For many, GPT-4o wasn't just a tool but a trusted companion for tasks like coding, creative writing, and just general support. Reddit users are comparing the sentiment to watching a close friend die, reflecting the emotional toll of losing access to a model they felt was more human-like and reliable. The decision disrupted workflows finely tuned to older models, leaving power users and developers scrambling. X (formerly Twitter) users are also asking, "Why kill GPT-4o?" Many thought it was perfect for coding sprints and GPT-5 feels like a "corporate downgrade." Facing intense backlash, Altman announced that GPT-4o would be reinstated for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, but the initial misstep eroded trust. Despite OpenAI's claims of superior reasoning and accuracy, boasting a 96% score on the MMLU benchmark compared to GPT-4's 86.4%, users reported GPT-5 as slower, less accurate, and less engaging. Simple tasks, like counting the letter "b" in "blueberry" or solving basic algebra (e.g., 5.9 = x + 5.11), tripped up the model. A big issue for many is that it feels like they traded personality for a robotic, formulaic tone. Some attributed these issues to a buggy "router" system that switches between GPT-5's standard and reasoning modes, often defaulting to the less capable standard mode. Others pointed to poor prompt engineering, but the consensus was clear: GPT-5 didn't live up to its billing as a transformative upgrade. Also read: 5 coding projects that I built with GPT-5: From Minesweeper to classic literature ChatGPT Plus subscribers, paying for premium access, were hit with a restrictive 200-message-per-week cap on GPT-5's "Thinking" mode, a sharp departure from the flexibility of previous models. The removal of model choice further fueled perceptions of "AI shrinkflation." The limits frustrated power users, some of whom canceled subscriptions, feeling OpenAI prioritized flash over functionality. In response, Altman promised to double rate limits, but the initial restrictions left a bitter taste, especially as competitors like Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini are offering more generous access. OpenAI's marketing set sky-high expectations, with Altman's Star Wars-inspired teasers and claims of AGI-level advancements. Yet, users found GPT-5's improvements incremental at best. X and reddit users are calling it "just a wrapper for GPT-4o - colder, dumber, and more boring." The gap between hype and reality echoed past criticisms of OpenAI's tendency to overpromise, amplifying disappointment when GPT-5 failed to deliver a transformative experience. The rollout was plagued by technical issues, including an unreliable router system, glitches in deep reasoning tasks, and a "severely nerfed" web browsing tool. Users reported GPT-5 freezing on complex prompts or producing inconsistent outputs. While OpenAI claimed to have resolved some bugs, the rocky debut reinforced perceptions of a rushed release. Beyond technical woes, the shift to GPT-5 had a surprising emotional impact. Users who relied on GPT-4o for personal tasks, like managing anxiety or brainstorming, felt betrayed by its removal. This is being underscored as OpenAI's failure to anticipate the human connection users formed with its models, turning a technical upgrade into a personal loss. The backlash comes at a precarious time for OpenAI, as rivals like Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.1), Google (Gemini 2.5), and open-source models like Alibaba's Qwen 3 gain traction. People are praising Claude for one-shot coding tasks and xAI's Grok 4 for math accuracy more so now, with some threatening to switch. Open-source models like DeepSeek's Prover V2, offering transparency and flexibility, further pressured OpenAI to deliver a polished product. Acknowledging the criticism, Altman committed to reinstating GPT-4o, increasing rate limits, and improving transparency about model selection. However, the damage to user trust is significant. OpenAI must now balance rapid innovation with user expectations, ensuring future updates prioritize reliability and choice. It seems that OpenAI forgot the golden rule: don't break what's already working well. As I sifted through the outcry on Reddit and X, I couldn't help but feel OpenAI misjudged its audience. ChatGPT-5's technical feats like its reduced error rates are undeniable, but they mean little when users feel let down by bugs, restrictions, and the loss of a beloved model. I've seen AI evolve from clunky chatbots to near-human companions, and this launch feels like a rare misstep for a company that's usually ahead of the curve. With competitors like Claude, Gemini and Grok gaining ground, I'm left wondering if OpenAI can turn this around.

Sam Altman admits killing GPT-4o after GPT-5 launch was a mistake: Here's why

\Why removing an AI feels like ending a relationship to so many When OpenAI pulled GPT-4o from its platform during the GPT-5 rollout, the change might have looked like a straightforward technical upgrade. But for many daily users, GPT-4o was more than a tool, it was a consistent conversational partner whose tone, rhythm, and personality had become familiar over time. Its abrupt disappearance triggered frustration, sadness, and, for some, a genuine sense of loss. This week, CEO Sam Altman addressed the backlash in a lengthy post on X, acknowledging that OpenAI had underestimated the depth of these connections. Altman wrote, "It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology (and so suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake)." Also read: Sam Altman rips into Elon Musk, accuses him of manipulating X for self-benefit Altman explained that OpenAI had been "closely tracking" this attachment for the past year, though it hadn't received much public attention, apart from a moment when an update made GPT-4o "too sycophantic." He drew a distinction between most users, who "can keep a clear line between reality and fiction or role-play," and a smaller percentage who might struggle, particularly those in vulnerable mental states. "If a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that," he said. These situations aren't always obvious. "Encouraging delusion is an extreme case and it's pretty clear what to do," Altman noted. "But the concerns that worry me most are more subtle. We plan to follow the principle of 'treat adult users like adults,' which in some cases will include pushing back on users to ensure they are getting what they really want." Altman acknowledged a reality many have observed: "A lot of people effectively use ChatGPT as a sort of therapist or life coach, even if they wouldn't describe it that way. This can be really good!" The ideal scenario, he said, is when people "level up toward their own goals" and see long-term life satisfaction improve. But the opposite is possible. "If users think they feel better after talking but they're unknowingly nudged away from their longer term well-being, that's bad," he wrote. It's also problematic, he said, if someone "wants to use ChatGPT less and feels like they cannot." Also read: Mumbai teen's KnowUrMedicine website helps those who can't read: Here's how it works Altman is wary of a future where "a lot of people really trust ChatGPT's advice for their most important decisions," even as he accepts it's coming and that soon "billions of people may be talking to an AI in this way." The GPT-4o case highlights an ethical challenge for AI companies: retiring a model isn't like updating old software. These systems have interaction patterns and personality traits users can connect with. Removing them can feel less like a performance upgrade and more like ending a relationship. For Altman, the path forward lies in deliberate design and better measurement. "We have much better tech to help us measure how we are doing than previous generations of technology had," he said, pointing to OpenAI's ability to directly engage users about their goals and satisfaction. In the age of personality-rich AI, the line between innovation and emotional connection is blurring and GPT-4o's sudden absence is an early lesson in what happens when that line is crossed too quickly.