GPT-5 Is Here: There’s Only One Feature Worth Writing About

My short review of OpenAI’s new flagship model

OpenAI GPT-5 is out. I didn’t get the embargo because I’m a bit hard on OpenAI at times (which I think is good), but I’ve read all the early reviews: from Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Every, Latent Space, METR, Artificial Analysis, and a couple of others. I’ve watched the 1-hour-long demo, read the four blog posts that OpenAI put out, and the model’s system card PDF.

I can summarize GPT-5’s main improvements in one paragraph: It’s cheap, fast at times, and available to all (most people think GPT-4o is state-of-the-art!); it’s better across benchmarks, dominating the price-performance Pareto frontier (some think the upgrade is underwhelming, though, especially compared to Anthropic’s Claude 4/4.1 models); it simplifies the product offering by internally selecting models for you (at its whim); it has superior tool-use skills which entails better agentic behavior (including research); it’s the best model in the world at coding (that’s key to help OpenAI devs build GPT-6 sooner); it still fails ARC-AGI 2; and still sucks at creative writing.

That’s it. It’s what you get from checking the sources I checked (which is, all of them). However, there’s one more thing that no one emphasized — which is also a win for OpenAI — and…