Mat Honan writes:

My colleague Grace Huckins has a great story on OpenAI’s release of GPT-5, its long-awaited new flagship model. One of the takeaways, however, is that while GPT-5 may make for a better experience than the previous versions, it isn’t something revolutionary. “GPT-5 is, above all else,” Grace concludes, “a refined product.”

This is pretty much in line with my colleague Will Heaven’s recent argument that the latest model releases have been a bit like smartphone releases: Increasingly, what we are seeing are incremental improvements meant to enhance the user experience. (Casey Newton made a similar point in Friday’s Platformer.) At GPT-5’s release on Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself compared it to when Apple released the first iPhone with a Retina display. Okay. Sure.

But where is the transition from the BlackBerry keyboard to the touch-screen iPhone? Where is the assisted GPS and the API for location services that enables real-time directions and gives rise to companies like Uber and Grindr and lets me order a taxi for my burrito? Where are the real breakthroughs?

In fact, following the release of GPT-5, OpenAI found itself with something of a user revolt on its hands. Customers who missed GPT-4o’s personality successfully lobbied the company to bring it back as an option for its Plus users. If anything, that indicates the GPT-5 release was more about user experience than noticeable performance enhancements.

And yet, hours before OpenAI’s GPT-5 announcement, Altman teased it by tweeting an image of an emerging Death Star floating in space. On Thursday, he touted its PhD-level intelligence. He then went on the Mornings with Maria show to claim it would “save a lot of lives.” (Forgive my extreme skepticism of that particular brand of claim, but we’ve certainly seen it before.)

It’s a lot of hype, but Altman is not alone in his Flavor Flav-ing here. Last week Mark Zuckerberg published a long memo about how we are approaching AI superintelligence. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei freaked basically everyone out earlier this year with his prediction that AI would harvest half of all entry-level jobs within, possibly, a year.

The people running these companies literally talk about the danger that the things they are building might take over the world and kill every human on the planet. GPT-5, meanwhile, still can’t tell you how many b’s there are in the word “blueberry.”

This is not to say that the products released by OpenAI or Anthropic or what have you are not impressive. They are. And they clearly have a good deal of utility. But the hype cycle around model releases is out of hand. [Continue reading…]