So, OpenAI showed the world GPT-5, their latest model. This is my hot take. I watched the whole livestream where they demoed these new models. There is a big version, a small version, a medium version. The prices are in line with what is happening in the market too. They are obsessed with vibe coding, and then there was this whole cringe segment with a woman fighting cancer explaining how useful GPT had been for her. Honestly, they could have spared us that part. Genuinely a bit cringe.
The only real novelty seems to be that GPT-5 decides on its own when it needs to use reasoning and when it does not. But then in the API they added a flag where you have to choose it yourself, so in the end I am not sure how well that stuff actually works if they make you pick it from the API anyway.
OpenAI is not innovating anymore
My conclusions are these. It is obvious that OpenAI no longer innovates. Maybe because they have become too big, maybe because there are too many commercial interests at stake, maybe because the scaling laws still hold but it takes too much money and too much compute to train a model that makes the next real qualitative leap in intelligence. In my view these are incremental additions. I was expecting a solid multimodal in and out, something moving a bit more toward robotics, toward what Nvidia is doing. Instead, meh. It left me a little cold, a little disappointed.
Who gets my subscription money
So, moving on to those of us who actually work with this stuff: who are we going to hand our couple hundred a month to for the full AI subscription? At this point I am giving it either to Anthropic or to Google, certainly not to OpenAI. Because Anthropic, if nothing else, stood out by publishing the MCP protocol, which is proving genuinely useful and impactful for doing practical things in everyday life that actually help people. Google is going hard on video and is building systems that are far more integrated than what OpenAI can do with email and calendar, since that is their own turf.
So my conclusion, in one word: GPT-5, incremental.
