That model, GPT-5, indeed launched earlier today with all the requisite fanfare. In an announcement video, Altman said that the product will serve as a “legitimate Ph.D.-level expert in anything—any area you need, on demand—that can help you with whatever your goals are.” He added that, “anyone, pretty soon, will be able to do more than anyone in history could.” In more concrete terms, GPT-5 is an upgrade to the ChatGPT interface you’re likely already familiar with: a model that’s now a bit better at writing, coding, math and science problems, and the like. (View Highlight)
Of course, Altman has a penchant for hyperbole, and OpenAI—like the rest of the AI industry—likes to tout each new model as the best ever. But this particular release feels notable for a few reasons. First, it has been a long wait since the release of GPT-4 in March 2023, just a few months after ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022. And second, in that time, OpenAI has become a bona fide tech empire: As of this week, OpenAI now provides enterprise ChatGPT accounts to federal agencies at essentially no cost; its products are also used by nearly every Fortune 500 company; and today Altman announced that roughly 700 million people worldwide use ChatGPT every week. In terms of sheer reach, this is the company’s most consequential product announcement, ever. (View Highlight)
During the ensuing two-plus years of the AI race, OpenAI has kept up by releasing a slew of more minor models and new features. When Google released a version of Gemini that was extremely fast and cheap, OpenAI did the same; when DeepSeek launched a free and advanced model that could “reason” through complex questions, OpenAI publicly released a still more powerful reasoning system of its own; as Anthropic’s Claude Code seemed to corner the AI-coding market, OpenAI came out with the Codex tool for software engineers. The empire’s ambitions had no limits. (View Highlight)
But these products were accompanied by a labyrinth of names and uses: GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini and GPT-4.1; o1-mini and o1-pro; o3 and o3-pro and o4-mini; and so on. This was a matter not only of poor branding but of poor design. Despite the numbers, for some uses o3 is better than o4. Users frequently complain that they don’t know how to select from OpenAI’s models. “We are near the end of this current problem,” Altman said on OpenAI’s podcast in June. “I am excited to just get to GPT-5 and GPT-6, and I think that’ll be easier for people to use.” (View Highlight)
Now OpenAI has arrived at GPT-5, and indeed, the model might be best understood as providing easier and frictionless use—as an amalgam of all of OpenAI’s disparate, discrete advances from the previous two-plus years. GPT-5 “eliminates this choice” among models and their specialties, Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, said in today’s announcement, and that may be the new model’s core feature. GPT-5 modulates its approach to your query, using more or less “reasoning” power—doing the equivalent of selecting among the GPT-4os and o3s and o4s—depending on what is asked of it. OpenAI is now retiring a large number of its previous, major models. (View Highlight)
To attract new users and customers (and keep existing ones from turning to other AI products), OpenAI has doubled down on institutional partnerships and polishing its product lineup. Sure, the company still pushes the limits of AI capabilities—but its products are what keep most consumers and businesses coming back for more. For instance, OpenAI has partnered with Bain & Company, Mattel, Moderna, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Harvard. It has brought on Jony Ive, the designer of the iPhone, to spearhead the creation of physical OpenAI devices. (View Highlight)
OpenAI’s animating theme for GPT-5 is user experience, not “intelligence”: Its new model is intuitive to use, fast, and efficient; adapts to human preferences and intentions; and easily personalizable. Before it is more intelligent, GPT-5 is more usable—and more likely to attract and retain users. “The important point is this,” Altman said, pinching a thumb and index finger together for emphasis: “We think you will love using GPT-5 much more than any previous AI.” (View Highlight)
ChatGPT’s original underlying model, was months old by the time the chatbot came out, but it was relatively obscure. Placing essentially the same program within a conversational interface, however, made the model easy to use and obsess over. GPT-4 would eventually provide a new engine—smarter and more capable—but this was almost beside the point; to most people, the product was already firmly established as ChatGPT. And, like the original ChatGPT, GPT-5 is free, although nonpaying users have a limit on their usage of this most advanced model—giving everyone a small taste of OpenAI’s ecosystem to open up the possibility they will want, and pay, for more. (View Highlight)
