Monologue: The Agony Of GPT-5

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Hello, and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

And this has been a tough week, I'm not going to lie.

Monday, we recorded a wonderful episode with Victoria's Song and Ashwin Rodriguez, which got lost due to a technical fault.

And then I recorded this entire monologue, which then got lost to a completely different computer, different room, different place, technical error.

I love making this show for all of you.

It's been kind of a pisser, but it's important we get on top of this goddamn subject.

So check the episode notes, buy a challenge coin, read the newsletter.

There's a premium version unrelated to this show.

I'd love if you'd subscribe.

And if you don't, I won't feel anything.

Don't worry about it.

But let's get to it.

Last week, OpenAI launched GPT-5, a new flagship model of some sort that's allegedly better at coding and writing but in reality is much more of the same another model that is indeterminately better at benchmarks built specifically for large language models because they can't do actual work the wall street journal reported late last year that it took multiple half billion dollar training runs to get gpt5 off the ground and altman himself said in the podcast with theo von of all people that gpt5 scared him and made him say what have we done and that's a good bloody question sammy according to open ai gpt5 is a unified system with a smart, efficient model that answers most questions, a deeper reasoning model, and a real-time router that quickly decides which model to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and your explicit intent.

I read all of that out because I wanted you to hear how convoluted GPT-5 is and how much effort OpenAI has had to put in to create something that, based on all reports, is fine.

To quote Simon Willison, it just does stuff.

Wowie Zowie.

In simpler terms, ChatGPT's version of GPT-5 takes a user's prompt and decides which model to use as a result, choosing one of a few sub-models, GPT-5 regular, mini, or nano, and then spits out an output.

And there are rate limits, by the way, so if you use it too much, you get kicked down to mini automatically.

If you ask it to think about something, it will choose to engage the reasoning part of the model.

These things do not think, by the way, they are probabilistic models.

So reasoning is kind of like you get a prompt and then it reads the prompt with another model and says, okay, what would the steps be to execute this?

It has some returns, but recent papers suggest that it doesn't work that well.

Anyway, using this, you mostly have to trust that OpenAI will choose the best model for the job as opposed to the cheapest one for OpenAI to serve, which is what I think they're actually doing.

As part of the launch, OpenAI has also killed access to all other models, or at least it's planning to, and truncated user access to two choices, GPT-5 or GPT-5 thinking, with legacy models like O4, O4 Mini, and their associated rate limits gone immediately for most, though some of them are back, and in 60 days for people paying $200 a month.

You'll work out why I'm dithering in a second.

This enraged the chat GPT subreddit, with users claiming that GPT-5 was, and I quote, wearing the skin of their dead friend, referring to GPT-4.0, and another saying that GPT-4.5 genuinely talked to them, and as pathetic as it sounds, was their only friend.

And I must be clear, we can make fun of these people if we want, but this is actually genuinely sad.

There is something going on here where people are so lonely that they want to talk to a chatbot.

Mock them if you want, and some of you will, and I don't know if I even want to.

But something is happening here and it isn't brilliant.

But after a few days, Clammy Sam Altman restored access to GPT-4.0 for paid users.

And then this only managed to stem the tide briefly, with one user saying that their baby was back, that they cried a lot, and that they were crying as they wrote the post, ending by saying, love you, I assume to GPT-4.0.

Here's the problem, though.

Users are now doubting that the 4-0 that OpenAI has restored is actually the same model.

One post claims that 4.0 has lost its soul, and another says that 4-0 is lobotomized all the way down.

In one thread, one user said that 4-0 had gotten markedly worse, suddenly, and another said it's definitely not the same, though others in the thread claim that it was.

Another post said legacy GPT-4-0 is GPT-5 in cosplay, even as others pleaded with them and said it was exactly the same, and that people were experiencing some strange phantom lover placebo effect.

And I think that's actually what's going on writ large.

Chat GPT was never a success based on its actual abilities or outputs or things it could do, but a global marketing campaign perpetuated by taking business media asleep at the wheel or worse still that wanted these companies to win and help them by lying.

I have done a comprehensive evaluation of the last three years of press around ChatGPT and GPT itself and you will look in the things in 2023 and there's shit that's just fucking made up.

There's a whole go and look up TaskRabbit GPT-4.

There are so many.

I'm gonna link one in the fucking notes.

There are people that claim that GPT-4 ordered a rabbit to complete a capture.

Now, on top of this not being a thing that TaskRabbit generally does, this is from the system card of GPT-4.

And it

claims that it hired a TaskRabbit, except when you look, it just said it messaged them.

It's very clearly made up, but everyone reported it as agents existing in 2023.

Every time I read this stuff, I feel a little goddamn insane.

But anyway, because these models do not have obvious replicable ways outside of benchmarks of testing what they can do, each user is effectively in a constant vibe check with the models and the sycophantic qualities of GPT-4.0 were clearly enough to endear them to the platform.

People using GPT-4.0

they couldn't tell you why it's different to GPT-5 other than it feels less human or doesn't do the same things even if those things are kind of hard to define.

This is what happens when you build a following for a product based on specious hype and vague promises and lies of inference of course and then allow users to make up the reasons that they care.

You begin engaging with the gamer mindset, a vibes-based fandom that's completely unbreakable, unless you make one subtle change that you could never see coming that breaks the illusion, leading to gamer-like distrust and anger.

You see, I theorise that the vast majority of ChatGPT users do not know why they used it in the first place.

Three years of media pressure to use AI, that AI was the future, their boss is saying AI is important, and that you would be left behind if you didn't use AI mean that people come to ChatGPT to work out why they're using it in the first place, which has led to all sorts of bizarre emotional attachments.

Kind of like one's attachments to a live service game, and shout out to Catharsis23 on Blue Sky who made this observation.

As a result, users were incredibly sensitive to changes like removing or changing a model, because their association with ChatGPT was based on however GPT-4.0 works and sounds.

By ripping it out and replacing it with GPT-5, users immediately felt jilted and swindled by OpenAI.

And much like a dying live service game, any changes that have been made as a result were met with paranoia and confusion.

Clamiel Altman's attempts to paper over the problem by boosting rate limits on GPT-5's thinking and restoring access to GPT-4.0 and other models for paid users were not enough, because in a very real sense, many of those users could not tell you why they liked 4-0 to begin with.

4-0 wasn't good so much as it was an investment of time.

By showing that OpenAI is willing to cut things arbitrarily, users can no longer trust that this investment of time is worthy, especially as many complain that at launch, GPT-5 deleted a bunch of conversations.

Now OpenAI sits in an odd spot where their supposedly huge Manhattan Project level launch has been met with either apathy or agony.

While they've placated users in the short term, it's very clear that the vast majority of users dislike GPT-5 and power users don't seem particularly impressed with it either.

This was meant to be the big launch that changed things for OpenAI forever, but it's turned into something of a mass betrayal, or just kind of a mass letdown.

And because it's based on vibes rather than its actual ability to do something, there's very little one can do to fix this problem.

It's unclear how all of this affects the company long term, but things do not seem good.

Sam Altman has already said that OpenAI is having to reallocate capacity for the next couple of months, prioritizing paying chat GPT users over API demand up from the current allocated capacity and commitments that they've made to their customers.

Code for those who do not want to pay priority processing, which is now available for any developer.

It's also unclear what happens next.

GPT-5 is not the future.

OpenAI is running out of capacity and their product, despite the fanfare, has no capabilities or reasons to adopt it that are really new or interesting.

Years of allowing the media to spin out ridiculous narratives about what AI can or could do using vague pablum that kind of suggests they're more powerful than they are has created a PR campaign for a product that does not exist, and the 700 million weekly active users of ChatGPT have clearly arrived there without much guidance, their attachment born of compulsion and societal pressure, rather than any real use cases.

When you allow people to define an indeterminately powerful tool by any standard they like with no interest in correcting them, with no interest in guiding them, with no interest in actually showing them what it was that they were paying for other than it can generate stuff.

You'll create an attachment to it that defies any real ability you have to control things.

OpenAI was never forced to productize and at scale it's very it's a very real possibility that people have, pressured by the media and society itself, forced themselves to find meaning in LLMs.

Somehow, even if it feels kind of stupid.

And what I mean by this is, you get to the product and there really isn't that much guidance.

Go on an OpenAI's website and have a look at the ChatGPT page and look at what it tells you to do.

It's quite vague.

You can look at, it can analyze data, right?

It can generate stuff.

It helps you do ideas.

Is that good?

Am I smart for using this?

Everything else you look at in the software world will tell you what it is you're using it for.

Any consumer-driven software at the very least.

Yet.

ChatGPT's never had to because the media for three years or two years, I guess, with ChatGPT

has kind of just sat there doing the work for them, telling them, oh, yeah, you can use it as a powerful personal assistant.

Assistant, how?

To assist me with what?

Nasty Kevin Roos, creepy Kevin, in the New York Times a few weeks ago when he did the everyone's using AI piece with Casey Newton, he said that it's a powerful assistant.

It's like, for what?

You can't do that.

This shit can't control my calendar.

I don't want it touching my emails.

I don't think most people do either.

So you've just got people who use it as a shitar search engine, an online companion, and a brainstorming thing.

Which is a natural way to get people kind of addicted, but addicted to a product you don't truly control and a product you don't truly understand.

One that can be swiped by just about anyone.

I actually think we're on the kind of downward spiral for this shit.

I'm oinking like a pig and squawking like a bird watching this happen.

Even Coreweave is crashing as I record this.

They're down 17.91%.

Still up too much, though.

And I really do think something has shifted thanks to GPT-5.

I'm excited.

And like Dr.

Stones once said, get excited because I think the next few months, like next year, is going to be chuckle-heavy.

We're going to be whimsy-pilled as we go through the remainder of the AI boom.

And I'll be here to guide you through it.

Thanks for listening.

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