\n<\/p>\n
Yesterday evening, Sam Altman shared an image of the Death Star on X. There was no caption on the picture, which showed the world-destroying Star Wars <\/em>space station rising over an Earth-like planet, but his audience understood the context. In fewer than 24 hours, OpenAI would release an AI model intended to wipe out all the rest.<\/p>\n That model, GPT-5, launched earlier today with all the requisite fanfare. In an announcement video, Altman said that the product will serve as a \u201clegitimate Ph.D.-level expert in anything\u2014any area you need, on demand\u2014that can help you with whatever your goals are.\u201d He added that \u201canyone, pretty soon, will be able to do more than anyone in history could.\u201d In more concrete terms, GPT-5 is an upgrade to the ChatGPT interface you\u2019re likely already familiar with: a model that\u2019s now a bit better at writing, coding, math and science problems, and the like.<\/p>\n Of course, Altman has a penchant for hyperbole, and OpenAI\u2014like the rest of the AI industry\u2014likes 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\u2019s 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\u2019s most consequential product announcement ever.<\/p>\n As OpenAI has ascended to the scale of a typical tech giant\u2014it is reportedly in talks for a $500 billion valuation\u2014the firm has also started to act like its corporate rivals. 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. (The Atlantic<\/em> and OpenAI have a corporate partnership.)<\/p>\n GPT-5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on a number of AI benchmarks, according to OpenAI\u2019s internal tests, but it is far from a clean sweep: On a few tests, competing products such as Google Gemini, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and xAI\u2019s Grok outperform, or are just barely below the level of, OpenAI\u2019s new top model. The GPT-5 announcement video and launch page also contained a number of errors\u2014incorrect labels, numbers and colors that made no sense, and missing entries on charts\u2014that made the program\u2019s precise abilities, and the trustworthiness of OpenAI\u2019s reporting, hard to discern (and led some observers to joke that perhaps GPT-5 itself had made, or hallucinated, the graphics). Yet that may not matter. OpenAI\u2019s animating theme for GPT-5 is user experience, not \u201cintelligence\u201d: Its new model is intuitive, fast, and efficient; adapts to human preferences and intentions; and is easy to personalize. Before it is more intelligent, GPT-5 is more usable<\/em>\u2014and more likely to attract and retain users. \u201cThe important point is this,\u201d Altman said, pinching a thumb and index finger together for emphasis: \u201cWe think you will love using GPT-5 much more than any previous AI.\u201d<\/p>\n In some sense, OpenAI is learning from its greatest success. ChatGPT took off because it effectively redesigned an existing product: GPT-3.5, ChatGPT\u2019s 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\u2014smarter and more capable\u2014but 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\u2014giving everyone a small taste of OpenAI\u2019s ecosystem to open up the possibility that they will want, and pay for, more.<\/p>\n 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 \u201creason\u201d through complex questions, OpenAI publicly released a still more powerful reasoning system of its own; as Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code seemed to corner the AI-coding market, OpenAI came out with the Codex tool for software engineers. The empire\u2019s ambitions had no limits.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t know how to select from OpenAI\u2019s models. \u201cWe are near the end of this current problem,\u201d Altman said on OpenAI\u2019s podcast in June. \u201cI am excited to just get to GPT-5 and GPT-6, and I think that\u2019ll be easier for people to use.\u201d<\/p>\n Now OpenAI has arrived at GPT-5, and indeed, the model might be best understood as providing easier and frictionless use\u2014an amalgam of all of OpenAI\u2019s disparate, discrete advances from the previous two-plus years. GPT-5 \u201celiminates this choice\u201d among models and their specialties, Mark Chen, OpenAI\u2019s chief research officer, said in today\u2019s announcement, and that may be the new model\u2019s core feature. GPT-5 modulates its approach to your query, using more or less \u201creasoning\u201d power\u2014doing the equivalent of selecting among the GPT-4os and o3s and o4s\u2014depending on what is asked of it. OpenAI is now retiring a large number of its previous major models.<\/p>\n Alongside GPT-5, OpenAI also announced a number of other additions to the ChatGPT experience to \u201cmake ChatGPT more personalized,\u201d Chen said, \u201cso it\u2019s more like your AI.\u201d These new features are customizable color schemes, personalities (\u201ccynic,\u201d \u201crobot,\u201d \u201clistener,\u201d \u201cnerd\u201d), and access to Gmail and Google Calendar\u2014all building on top of the recently added \u201cMemories\u201d feature, through which ChatGPT can pull information from previous chats. These add-ons have little to do with the bot\u2019s engine\u2014how \u201cintelligent\u201d or \u201ccapable\u201d it is\u2014but they will make ChatGPT more individualized, more useful, and perhaps more fun. Businesses can integrate their data as well. Just as the years of photos and notes on your iPhone make switching to a Google Pixel undesirable, or years of using Google Drive make migrating to Microsoft OneDrive hard, if ChatGPT morphs from a vanilla bot into your<\/em> AI or your company\u2019s AI, leaving for Gemini or Claude becomes not just burdensome but a downgrade.<\/p>\n At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feels<\/em>\u2014and, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence\u2014a model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the company\u2019s narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all disease\u2014it is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday evening, Sam Altman shared an image of the Death Star on X. There was no caption on the picture, which showed the world-destroying Star Wars space station rising over an Earth-like planet, but his audience understood the context. In fewer than 24 hours, OpenAI would release an AI model intended to wipe out all<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2214,2475,8239],"class_list":{"0":"post-14624","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-chatgpt","9":"tag-race","10":"tag-resets"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}