'GPT-5 feels dumber': Users on OpenAI’s newest model

OpenAI recently launched GPT-5, which it described as its smartest and most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model so far.

But its users have a very different opinion. Some users said that the new model felt like a “downgrade,” while still others called it “dumber” than previous versions.


Users ask for GPT-4o to return

During a Reddit ‘Ask me anything’ (AMA) session on Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and members of the GPT-5 team faced a wave of feedback from users. Many were unhappy with the new model and asked for GPT-4o to be brought back, especially those who had built their workflows around it.

Altman acknowledged the issues and shared some insight into what went wrong.

“GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today," he said on Friday.

He explained that on the day of launch, GPT-5's autoswitcher was out of commission for a major part of the day, due to which it seemed "dumber."

"Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often. We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query," he added.

The community pushed hard to bring back GPT-4o, and Altman said OpenAI is seriously considering it. “We are looking into letting Plus users continue to use 4o. We are trying to gather more data on the trade-offs,” he said.

“We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for,” he added.

Altman also made a few other promises to help improve the user experience. He said that the company will:

• Double the GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users.
• Update the user interface to make it easier to manually trigger thinking.

Altman admitted that things didn’t go as smoothly as planned. He said that they expected some "bumpiness" since they were rolling out so many things at once, but that this was a "little more bumpy" than they had hoped for.