From Michael Spencer and Raphaëlle d’Ornano from AI Supremacy

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After such a long wait, we get the most factual ChatGPT ever. But is that enough? 

Screenshot of GPT-5 Live event. August 7th, 2025

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So I listened to OpenAI’s 1 hour live stream about GPT-5’s launch, watch it here. In this article Raphaëlle d’Ornano and her team from Decoding Discontinuity (please skip the OpenAI summary to read if if you want) Newsletter will have some insights about OpenAI in the marketplace and their strategic evolution. 

Some of GPT-5’s talking points are crazy exaggerated, but that’s the world we live in now, so please take some of these quotes with a grain of salt. This article is fairly long, so click on the title or click below to read it on the web (it will be easier to see the infographics).

Read this on the Web

(Like) “Having a team of PhDs in your pocket. “

Read the Blog

• As of the second week of August, 2025 – GPT-5 is rolling out today to Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, with Enterprise and EDU next week.
• It tooks OpenAI 162 days to get from GPT-4.5 to GPT-5. GPT‑4.5 was officially released on February 27, 2025. But the wait for GPT-5 felt like years! That’s also because Anthropic, Google and Qwen caught up, and we haven’t even gotten DeepSeek-R2 yet.

TL;DR

OpenAI’s GPT-5 may not be as good as we had hoped, but it’s a product suited for their unique approach to AI. 

1. Unified System with Auto-Switching
2. Advanced Reasoning Capabilities
3. Enhanced Multimodal Functionality
4. Improved Coding Performance
5. Reduced Hallucinations and Improved Safety
6. Customizable Personalities and Interface
7. Expanded Context Window: 256k
8. Integration with External Tools
9. Sycophancy Reduction
10. Accessibility and Pricing: API pricing is now at $1.25/million input tokens and $10/million output tokens, with reasoning tokens counted as output.

“It is a unified system that automatically switches between providing a quick response and taking time to reason through a hard problem to provide the best answer.” – Srinivas Narayanan

Mostly a Quality of Life upgrade

GPT-5 is not a breakthrough, but an iterative improvement over GPT-4.5, with some areas, like writing, reportedly weaker than predecessors. While GPT-5 is a significant step forward, it’s not a revolutionary leap toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) or a meaningful improvement outside of some quality of life features. That’s not to say that the slick interface and improved customization in design, voice and personality isn’t significant.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Personas

• Preset Personalities: Users can choose from four new preset personalities to customize how ChatGPT interacts:
  • Cynic (sarcastic, blunt)
  • Robot (dry, precise)
  • Listener (calm, supportive)
  • Nerd (curious, explanatory)
    These are opt-in, adjustable anytime, and create different conversational styles without needing custom prompts.

Great Customization and Personalization

I think GPT-5’s memorable part is not its unified system but rather the moves in the personalization and customization direction. Easily Voice Mode to me gets the highest marks here: 

• Voice Mode Customization: The updated Voice mode can adjust tone, pace, and response length based on user instructions. Voice features are more adaptive and available to all users with higher usage limits for paid subscribers. Voice supports custom GPTs but currently retains a standard default voice behavior separate from the personalities available in text. 
• One word answer feature is super engaging for me! 
• OpenAI seems to have noticed that Health questions are a big deal for ChatGPT users. 

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“It’s been a great year for health AI, both for performance at the frontier and at cost. We’ve gone from 0% (GPT-4o) to 46% (GPT-5 thinking) on HealthBench Hard, a health benchmark built with 250+ doctors.” – Karan Singhal

Health

GPT‑5 is their best model yet for health-related questions, empowering users to be informed about and advocate for their health. The model scores significantly higher than any previous model on HealthBench⁠. 

Evaluations

GPT‑5 is much smarter across the board, as reflected by its performance on academic and human-evaluated benchmarks, particularly in math, coding, visual perception, and health.

It sets a new state of the art across math (94.6% on AIME 2025 without tools), real-world coding (74.9% on SWE-bench Verified, 88% on Aider Polyglot), multimodal understanding (84.2% on MMMU), and health (46.2% on HealthBench Hard)—and those gains show up in everyday use.

• Claude Opus 4.1 got 74.5% on SWE-bench for the record. Barely any difference. Meanwhile Claude Code dominates via Cursor, Loveable and of course Github Copilot (ironically). 

In the demos of GPT-5 Coding, they even talked about it “vibe coding” for folk. It was super weird that they borrowed this term.

Voice in GPT-5

You can use it with video so it sees what you see. Free users can chat for hours. Subscribers can customize experiences better with different settings: e.g. one word answers, concise or more elaborate. 

• The voice in voice-mode is audiably more natural, fluent and responsive. 

Design 

• You can customize the colors of your chat and the personalities. (Supportive, Sarcastic, Professional, etc…) . I like these customization and personality QOL features. 

Coding

GPT‑5 shows significant gains in benchmarks that test instruction following and agentic tool use, the kinds of capabilities that let it reliably carry out multi-step requests, coordinate across different tools, and adapt to changes in context.

“Expertise on demand, at PhD depth”

• According to the talking points of Siya Raj Purohit: “GPT-3 felt like a bright high school student. GPT-4 like a sharp undergrad. GPT-5 works like a panel of doctoral-level experts from different disciplines debating your problem, challenging each other, and converging on the best solution.”

Reasonable API Cost

• $1.25 input / $10 output per million tokens – See Full pricing list. 

Showcases

Full disclosure, these read less like actual reviews, and more like promotions (the sad reality of today’s world: 

1. GPT-5 Hands-On: Welcome to the Stone Age
2. GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff
3. An exclusive inside look at GPT-5 – Listen on YouTube.

Interface Personalization: Users, especially on paid tiers, can select accent colors for UI elements like conversation bubbles and highlighted text, helping organize and personalize the visual chat experience. 

• A lot of the paid features are simply designed for you to upgrade for them to maximize revenu

OpenAI: No Longer a Frontier Lab

Still GPT-5 is fun for us writers and creators to speculate upon, in part just because we’ve been waiting for GPT-5 for so long. While it is anticlimactic and won’t be a frontier model for long, this makes OpenAI has a full-fledged B2C product company and on longer the frontier lab we once knew. 

System Card

Read System Card

• Go deeper into the models and Unified GPT-5 system. 

Unified System Structure: GPT-5 is a cohesive system comprising: 

• gpt-5-main: A fast, high-throughput model for general queries.
• gpt-5-thinking: A deeper reasoning model for complex problems.
• Real-time router: Dynamically selects the appropriate model based on query complexity, user intent (e.g., “think hard”), and conversation type, continuously improving through user feedback and performance metrics.
• Mini versions (gpt-5-main-mini, gpt-5-thinking-mini) handle queries after usage limits, and a gpt-5-thinking-nano is available for developers via the API.
• gpt-5-thinking-pro: Accessible in ChatGPT with parallel test-time compute for enhanced performance.

There’s already been a lot of community commentary around how good or bad GPT-5 Thinking is. The system card focuses on gpt-5-main and gpt-5-thinking, with evaluations for other models in the appendix. For full details, see: https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-system-card/

AI Alignment

GPT-5 has supposedly less hallucinations and less tendencies to sycophancy. I’m sure they tried, as far as this startup is capable of taking trust, saftey and alignment seriously with its present leadership and unique history. 

elvis notes that OpenAI also released an insane amount of guides on how to use GPT-5. Well of course they did! 

“But what it (GPT-5) really brings to the table is the fact that it just does things…The burden of using AI is lessened. “ – Ethan Mollick

To estimate gpt-5-thinking’s autonomous software capabilities, METR used the methodology outlined in their recent paper. It does paint GPT-5 in a more favorable light than other evaluations. Very hard to believe they are truly independent as they claim. 

• GPT-5 Is Here: There’s Only One Feature Worth Writing About
• Vibe-Check: GPT-5: Our hands-on review of OpenAI’s newest modelbased on weeks of testing

Artificial Analysis, METR and others were chosen to give praise!

What’s clear of course is this is not a Frontier Model that will last very long in today’s dynamic LLM global arena. This is more of an upgrade to ChatGPT’s interface. Don’t be fooled by the hypers, Techno Optimists, preachers and Evangelists. A lof the mentioned voices – it’s literally their job to praise OpenAI (the dominant product right now of ChatGPT).

Many of these organizations also have partnerships with OpenAI or investors with connections to them.

• Details about METR’s evaluation of OpenAI GPT-5

Is GPT-5 Frontier in Agentic AI?