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.
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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 out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!”
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