10 Things GPT-5 Changes

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, 10 Things That Change After GPT5. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:35this being GPT-5 week, that the long reads and or big think episode of the week had to be dedicated to the subject of GPT-5 in some way, shape, or form. I've obviously been thinking about this topic a lot, and I've been trying to think about what I think the state of play is post-GPT-5, taking into account people's first reactions, how I'm seeing it used, what I think it suggests for the direction of the industry, I came up with a list of 10 things that I think will change or are changing or are just being reinforced now that this model is live. You'll see these aren't big societal pronouncements that relate to the capabilities of GPT-5.

1:16This is much more practical and specific and about the state of play in the AI space itself. This is, of course, all just my subjective opinion based on my observations, and I'll be interested to see what you guys think, especially as you get access to this model and play around a bit. Now, the first thing that I think changes or perhaps is reinforced is our sense of LLM progress. There has been a question for some time now of whether we were hitting some sort of plateau. This really started to be a narrative around the end of last year, frankly, around this time last year, when we got what we felt like were delays on GPT-5.

1:52There was a lot of scuttlebutt about pre-training just not working as well, and a big shift that came with the introduction of reasoning models and new approaches to scaling like test time compute that put the emphasis at the moment of inference rather than on pre-training. Subsequent to that, of course, we got a whole new generation of models like O1 and then O3, and all the reasoning models from the other labs as well, that showed that even if the pre-training technique was reaching its limits, there were still lots of areas of development to be had. I think with this model though, even though there are all those other areas of development, and places that we are going to continue to get progress.

2:29There is broadly a sense that at least this paradigm has at least some amount of a plateau. CEO Amjad Massad wrote, can't help but feel the crushing weight of diminishing returns. We need a new S-curve. AI researcher Jack Morris affirmed this but also put it more positively. He wrote, shortest explanation of GBT-5, this is exactly what the scaling laws predicted. The model is better, the returns are diminishing, and sadly, absolute general intelligence improvements will only get smaller. The good news is that there's still so much to do. Personality, reasoning, memory, and creativity are still open problems.

3:05And that brings me, I think, to the second point, which is the idea that the emphasis in model improvement is shifting away from just raw capabilities and towards tool usage, and how models can interact with the real world. This was the core subject of Ben Hyluck's essay on latent space about GPT-5. He summed up on Twitter,

3:36For those of you who didn't listen to my intro episode on GPT-5, Ben basically made a comparison to the Stone Age. He argued that what marked the dawn of human intelligence was humans learning how to use tools. As humans, he wrote, we manifest our

4:06I think Ben is dead on here. And I think a lot of what we're going to see is optimizations and improvements that are designed for how models and how their agentic expressions can actually go use tools. One of the things you start to notice now, even as companies present the results of their own benchmarks, is that they're always going to share models raw, but then also models that use tools. For example, when OpenAI presented GPT-5's performance on humanity's last exam, while it got 24.8 % with no tools, with a full slate of tools including Python and a search, it got 42%. In other words, tools represent a whole new frontier of places to get more gains from these models.

4:48And so if you are worried that we are maybe on a raw capabilities plateau, at least with current strategies, there is very clearly a ton of new areas and new frontiers to explore that will continue to see greater progress. Moving on now, one of the things that is most clear from the release of GPT-5 is that this is a huge boon for the normies. For people who have mostly only interacted with ChatGPT through whatever model was default like 4.0, they are going to have their head spun by some of the capabilities of GPT-5. Dan Shipper from Every had his mom test it out, and she was glowing, saying this is way more comprehensive than the answers I usually get from ChatGPT.

5:27The information it gives me is readable and flows really well. The model is gold. Signal argued that the no-model roulette thing is actually bigger than most people, especially average people, will clock. Basically, they argue that the amount of cognitive load it takes for people to understand or try to figure out which model to use was actually even more damaging than it seemed. One of the things we saw when DeepSeek launched earlier this year was that even though the model itself was less performant than the reasoning models that OpenAI had available, OpenAI wasn't giving those models to people as their base.

5:58Which means that when people tried DeepSeek, it was the first time they had used a reasoning model, and the experience blew them away. Now that experience is going to be the norm for everyone, and I think you're going to see a massive democratization of a lot of the best capabilities of AI to huge new pools of audiences that didn't have access to them before. I want to talk specifically about two use case categories that I think get a major boost in that way. The first is strategy support or strategic thinking. Since the advent of reasoning models, especially O3, LLMs have for many of us become constant strategic companions.

6:32I am literally day in and day out weighing different decisions for super intelligent or for the podcast through the strategic lens of previously 03. Now, of course, this does not mean that I act on the strategy. There are still big gaps, but the reasoning models really have hit a point where they're extremely adept at helping you think more comprehensive and holistically about the types of decisions that you're going to make. GPT-5 improves that meaningfully. First of all, in my early tests, I've seen the reduction of sycophancy that OpenAI I worked so hard on manifest as a willingness to take a harder line on decisions, which is a key part of strategic thinking.

7:09Whereas previously, O3 would try to hedge and explain or justify anything that I said, it now is much more comfortable actually weighing different options and suggesting a best course of action. Again, that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily any more likely to take it, but it's a lot more instructive and informative and useful to see what the AI actually thinks, not just how it justifies what I think. This type of strategic collaboration was not possible with the non-reasoning models. And for that reason, the vast majority of ChatGPT users have not engaged with the models in that way. I think it will be one of the biggest unlocks for people's personal productivity, for how they manage their careers, for how they manage their part of businesses, to be able to engage with the strategic capabilities of GPT-5.

7:53Now, of course, the other even more obvious thing is that we are about to see an absolute explosion in Vibe Coding. Vibe Coding was already an insanely fast-growing area of AI usage, pretty definitively the most important theme of 2025. As I said on my initial coverage, OpenAI made it pretty clear they believe that about 700 million weekly new Vibe Coders are going to come online very, very soon. It was not just, in my opinion, that they really wanted to catch up with Anthropic for the sake of professional developers. Yes, that was and is absolutely a goal, but I think that they're thinking about this more broadly.

8:31I think that OpenAI have come to the conclusion, one that I agree with, by the way, that coding is a new lingua franca and that interacting with code via vibe coding type tools is going to be simply a standard part of using computers in the future. Now, this won't happen all at once. Yes, certainly now that GPT-5 is available, some number of their 700 million weekly users who haven't been vibe coding at all will say things like, hey, build me a game or build me a website, but it'll take a while for that to become normalized. But normalized, I believe it will become. And it's clear with GPT-5 that they're placing a lot of emphasis on that type of beginner usage.

9:10A term you hear all over the place with people's first impressions of GPT-5 is one-shotting. The idea that with very little guidance and very little follow-up, they were able to one-shot some comprehensive thing that code could create. Alem writes, what's truly impressive about GBT5 one-shotting this game isn't the graphics, it's the flawless prompt adherence and constraint handling. A fully functional, interactable game generated in a single pass. This level of instruction following and code generation is wild. Other people have been sharing all the different things that they've one-shotted with GBT5.

9:44A space simulator, a meditation app, a Duolingo clone, Windows 95 even. The more that people share these sort of examples, the more that regular people are going to come online, try it out, and realize that this entirely new capability set that they didn't even consider before is now opened up to them. Now, this doesn't mean that everyone is in full agreement around OpenAI's emphasis here. Dax, for example, writes, I think the biggest market for AI coding tools is software engineers. A lot of the industry believes it's non-software engineers, hence the focus on one-shotting. But in the end, I believe it'll be the smaller numbers.

10:20That created a great conversation. Atlassian engineer Kun Chen writes, It's hard to say. Web 2.0 was less about professional writers, more about regular bloggers. TikTok was less about filmmakers with a DSLR, but more random people shooting random stuff. Things that don't feel valuable in aggregate can add up when there's a long tail. What's for sure is that even if traditional software engineers remain the majority of software engineers, at least when it comes to important code that gets pushed, Vibe Coding for All is a major, major theme, unlocked in a huge way by GPT-5.

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13:34Just go to bit.ly slash super agent. That's bit.ly slash super agent, all one word. And if you have any questions, the agent can even help you book an appointment with our team. One sub theme from all of this, which isn't exactly new, but which I do think is profound is let's call it the consumerification of OpenAI. OpenAI certainly hasn't abandoned any part of their enterprise efforts. In fact, they used the occasion of their announcement to share that they now had 5 million businesses using ChatGPT. COO Brad Lightcap, in his thread, wrote that he thought that developers and enterprises especially will love it.

14:13We also recently got news that OpenAI was developing their own forward-deployed engineering teams to service big customers who were spending at least$10 million with them with the sort of very hands-on type of development engagement that's required for enterprise AI to work. And yet at the same time, it's unignorable that ChatGPT is AI to a huge portion of the world. In advance of the announcement of GPT-5, the company shared that they were on track to reach 700 million weekly active users. As Professor Ethan Malek pointed out, that's 8.6 % of the world's population using ChatGPT every week. That consumer basis, the fact that they are so definitively the model, the company, the application that people think about when they think about AI, has to go into the decisions that they make about where they're going to put their emphasis.

15:02GPT-5, to me, is not a strictly better implementation of AI than the previous OpenAI models was. They have talked endlessly about how challenging the model selector was, but it wasn't for us power users. In fact, one of the big complaints that you see all over places like X right now is that the power users want their menus back. They want to be able to choose between the different models based on their query. No, instead, OpenAI has made a choice here. They've made a choice to prioritize the needs and UX features that will most benefit the normal consumer over those of the power user, which doesn't mean that they're not considering the power user.

15:39The people who are paying$200 a month, like obviously I am, still can go in and select the legacy models to be available in their menus. And I'm sure there will be other concessions to power users that come online in the future. But it's very clear that this is a step towards the emphasis of that base user, the 700 million in general, not the 7 million power users on the top. The implications for the enterprise, I think, are really interesting. On the one hand, as we'll see in just a minute, I think it opens up competitive opportunities for others. On the flip side, there is kind of an argument that we might see a bit of a convergence of consumer and enterprise AI usage.

16:16Basically, it wouldn't ultimately be all that surprising to me if in practice, the simplicity and the decisions that they made for consumers with GPT-5 actually improve its utilization in the enterprise as well. I don't think that's a for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised. Still, like I said, I do think that one of the other things that has changed after GPT-5 is that it really reinforces that there is opportunity for the other big players, for Gemini, for Grok and Claude. OpenAI has had such a definitive lead since the beginning because of the launch of ChatGPT, because they were first to get to a GPT-4 class model.

16:51In fact, we called them GPT-4 class models. But even at their size and scale, the decisions that they make have trade-offs to other decisions they don't make. When it comes to finding the right balance between an intersection of consumer and enterprise, there are reasons to think that Google Gemini is better positioned than even OpenAI is. And as much improved as GPT-5 is when it comes to coding, there are lots and lots of coders out there who are not shifting their daily driver away from Claude. Beyond that, I think the continued focus on the consumer for OpenAI opens up an opportunity for Claude and Anthropic to continue to peel off enterprise users from OpenAI.

17:29Although, as we'll discuss in a minute, there is a cost dimension here, which could make that a little bit trickier. And then for Grok, there's the simple fact that GPT-5, as good as it is and as much of an improvement as it represents, is not some crazy knockout blow on performance. Grok4 Heavy beat it, for example, on a number of the benchmarks. Tony from XAI wrote, Very proud of us at XAI after seeing the GPT-5 release. With a much smaller team, we are ahead in many ways. Grok4's world-first unified model and crushing GPT-5 in benchmarks like ArcGi. OpenAI is a very respectful competitor and still the leader in many areas, but we're fast and relentless.

18:06Many new models to share in the next few weeks. And look, for us as consumers, the fact that there are all these opportunities for the other big labs post-GPT5 release is awesome. It means that we are going to get so much advancement in so many areas. We are just going to be drowning in opportunity for the foreseeable future. Now, one interesting thing that comes out talking about enterprise and developers and Anthropik's ability to peel off, for example, users from OpenAI, is that this was very much not just a capability competition moment, but a price competition moment. People were gagged by how low OpenAI priced this.

18:44Theo writes, I've been using GPT-5 for a bit now. The model broke me at so good. I didn't know what the price was. I assumed it would be 03 Pro price because it's that smart. Nope, truly insane. Nego Christie writes, this was an attempted anthropic kill shot. Get cozier with cursor and make pricing 10x cheaper than Opus. Excited to see how Anthropic responds. Personally, I don't mind$15 per million inputs. Give me the frontier. And at least for now, Nikko is far from alone in that. In fact, in Menlo's mid-year LLM market update, they found very much that at this point, people are not switching models for price.

19:19They are switching only for performance. However, workloads are going up dramatically. We're now in the multi-agent paradigm, which we'll get into in just a minute. and even as costs come down, the sheer number of tokens that we are going to be consuming is likely to be going up faster. So I'm not sure how long enterprises at least will have the privilege of not thinking about price. Now, going back to the idea that there's so much competitive opportunity between all the labs right now, it really reinforces that a lot of the action is going to take place at the app layer. In a world where all the models are commoditized and very closely clustered together in terms of capabilities, the actual product experiences that people have are going to be the big drivers of customer devotion.

20:05Mixpanel founder Suhail has been talking about this all year. Back in January, he shared a tweet from Cursor where they wrote, O3 Mini is out to all Cursor users. We're launching it for free for the time being to let people get a feel for the model. The Cursor devs still prefer Sonnet for most tasks, which surprised us. Suhail added to that, the app layer decides which model is used and which model isn't used now. Defaults matter. A few months later, he shared comments from Sam Altman and said, app layer incoming. One, very smart models will be commoditized. Two, build the best defining product in the space.

20:37Now, clearly OpenAI gets this. It's why they're building and released, to much fanfare, ChatGPT agent. They very clearly value owning the relationship with their customers, rather than just being the foundation layer that everyone else builds on. Still, for builders in this space, the fact that there is going to be so much opportunity at the app layer is a really exciting development and confirmation. Once again, for us as consumers, it means that the amount of choice we have, the amount of people who are building things customized for our use cases, is just likely to be incredibly, incredibly high.

21:10Last thing that changes, or at least gets amplified in the wake of GPT-5. This kind of goes back to tool usage. This kind of goes back to the way that agent decoding is evolving. But it's very clear that a big phenomenon right now is not just autonomous agents doing things for us. It's groups or parallel sets of autonomous agents doing things with a selector to determine which output is best or to combine the results. One of the things that Beth Jezos noted, comparing GPT-5 and GroK-4 on Humanity's last exam, is that GPT-Pro, even with tools, still did not beat Grok4 Heavy. Grok4 Heavy had 44.4%, as opposed to GPT-5 Pro with tools, 42%.

21:54Beth pointed out, however, that given that it's a single agent rather than a swarm of agents, that's very impressive. Now, I actually am not totally sure that GPT-5 Pro for that humanity last exam isn't a similar type of structure. In their research blog, OpenAI writes, for the most challenging complex tasks, we're also releasing GPT-5 Pro, a variant of GPT-5 that thinks even longer using scaled but efficient parallel test time compute. I would imagine that parallel test time compute involves a process similar to Grok4 Heavy where they spin up and deploy multiple agents to do that work in parallel.

22:28And increasingly, this is just going to be the norm. You're starting to see it with coding, with all of these IDEs building and tooling where you can spin up multiple agents at once. And I think you can view that as a leading indicator of where everything else is going to go. Right now, you're not using multiple agents at the same time to write social media copy, but that's only because the interfaces that you have access to aren't suggesting that you do. I think this is going to be one of the areas where we next saturate and see how much power we can pull out of it. And I think that that process starts right now.

22:57So friends, those are 10 things that I can see changing in the wake of GPT-5. Let me know what you think about these. Which are the most significant? Are there any you disagree with? Are there any that are obvious that I've missed here? Excited to begin this conversation and excited to really see what this model can do. But for now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. I appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.