Power users of OpenAI's blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT were left largely unimpressed by the company's recently unveiled GPT-5 AI model.
Those who became familiar with the convivial and sycophantic tone of GPT-5's predecessor were particularly distraught by its "cold" and far less supportive demeanor, accusing OpenAI of cutting corners.
The pushback was significant enough for OpenAI to both make previous iterations available once more to paying customers — and even to lean back into the sycophancy that defined GPT-4o, with the company tweeting on Friday that it's "making GPT-5 warmer and friendlier based on feedback that it felt too formal before."
The stakes are incredibly high as OpenAI eyes a half-a-trillion-dollar valuation — but its disappointing new model, which it has been hyping up for several years now, has some insiders concerned and disillusioned, the Washington Post reports.
The uncomfortable reality: it feels unclear that GPT-5 represented any genuine strides towards human-level intelligence, OpenAI's openly stated goal — it can't even correctly count the number of r's in the word "raspberry," users quickly noticed.
If anything, GPT-5 felt more like two steps forward, one step back, as concerns over an ongoing AI bubble continue to grow.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself told reporters last week that he believes we're in a "phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI" — but claimed his firm wasn't any trouble because of its outsized influence.
The industry is in a precarious position, transitioning from promising major leaps to far less spectacular, incremental updates. Meanwhile, experts are retooling their predictions of a rogue AI overthrowing humanity, considering the tech's recent diminutive advancements.
"The Doomer narratives were wrong," entrepreneur and White House AI czar David Sacks tweeted earlier this month. Instead of AI "leaving others in the dust, and quickly achieving a godlike superintelligence," the "leading models are clustering around similar performance benchmarks."
Developers were also left unimpressed.
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