OpenAI released its long-anticipated GPT‑5 model on Thursday, packing smarts that company CEO Sam Altman likened to having a “team of Ph.D.-level experts in your pocket.”
The latest version of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot is its “smartest, fastest and most useful model yet,” it said, with fewer hallucinations and more articulate writing capabilities for composing emails and reports. ChatGPT-5 will also excel at coding and answering health-related questions. A basic version of the new model is available for free; users in paid tiers will get higher usage limits, as well as access to GPT-5 Pro.
“It reminds me of when the iPhone went from those giant-pixel old ones to the Retina display, and then I went back to using one of those big pixelated things,” Altman said, in introducing the model as a major improvement over its predecessor GPT-4, launched in 2023. “And I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe how bad we had it.’”
GPT-5 has long been anticipated by AI experts as a significant technological advance and step toward the kind of superintelligent systems that almost every major technology company is scrambling to build.
OpenAI-backed Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Anthropic, Meta Platforms Inc., and others so far have plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into AI projects, with no seeming end in sight.
OpenAI’s announcement, the latest in a slew of product news this year, didn’t come without some pause. Some of GPT-5’s new abilities appear to be refinements to features that ChatGPT and other AI systems already have, and OpenAI did not share benchmark evaluations or tests that rank GPT-5’s abilities against rival models — as is common in many AI product releases.
An OpenAI spokesperson acknowledged to NBC News that there are still “key limitations in areas like persistent memory, autonomy, and adaptability across tasks.”
The company’s lack of complete transparency underscores criticism from the likes of FLI President Max Tegmark, who claims OpenAI “refuses to articulate what kind of legally binding standards the industry should be subject to, and continues to release increasingly powerful systems with no meaningful oversight.”
