The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
blog.charliemeyer.co
The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
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Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#2The focus now is not the model, but the Product - "here we improve the usuability by removing the choice between models", "here is a better voice for tts", "here is a nice interface for previewing html"
Only about 5 minutes of the whole presentation are dedicated to enterprise usage (COO in an interview sort of indirectly confirms that haven't figured it out yet). And they are cutting the costs already (opaque routing between models for non-API users is a clear sign of that). The term "AGI" is dropped, no more exponential scaling bullshit - just incremental changes over the time and only over select few domains. Actually it is a more welcoming sign and not concerning at all that this technology matures and crystallizes around this point. We will charitably forget and forgive all the insane claims made by Sam Altman in the previous years. He can also forget about cutting ties with Microsoft for that same reason.
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#3Issues like this are why I don't use ai agents for code. I don't want to sift through the bullshit confidently spewed out by the model.
It doesn't understand anything. It can't possibly "understand my codebase". It can only predict tokens, and it can only be useful if the pattern has been seen before. Even then, it will product buggy replicas, which I've pointed out during demos. I disabled the ai helpers in my IDEs because the slop the produce is not high quality code, often wrong, often misses what I wanted to achieve, often subtly buggy. I don't have the patience to deal with that, and I don't want to waste the time on it.
Time is another aspect of this conversation, with people claiming time wins, but the data not backing it up, possibly due to a number of factors intrinsic to our squishy evolved brains. If you're interested, go find gurwinder's article on social media and time - I think the same forces are at work in the ai-faithful.
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#4> They admitted that they were, and I am not lying about this, paywalling chat colors. […] This is a feature that a company adds when they are out of ideas
This observation + sherlocking cursor suggests that perhaps sherlocking is the ideation strategy. Curious to see if they’re subsidizing token costs specifically to farm and Sherlock ideas
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#5[dead]
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#6The messaging is all over the place anyway. Not so long ago OAI was talking about faster iterations and warning people to not expect huge leaps. (A position that makes sense imo). Yet people talk about AGI in a serious manner?
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#7Yes, GPT-5 is more of an iteration than anything else, and to me this says more about OpenAI than the rest of the industry. However, I think the majority of the improvements over the past year have been difficult to quantify using benchmarks. Users often talk about how certain models "feel" smarter on their particular tasks, and we won't know if the same is true for GPT-5 until people use it for a while.
The "GPT-5 will show AGI" hype was always a ridiculously high bar for OpenAI, and I would argue that the quest for that elusive AGI threshold has been an unnecessary curse on machine learning and AI development in general. Who cares? Do we really want to replace humans? We should want better and more reliable tools (like Claude Code) to assist people, and maybe cover some of the stuff nobody wants to do. This desire for "AGI" is delivering less value and causing us to put focus on creative tasks that humans actually want to do, putting added stress on the job market.
The one really bad sign in the launch, at least to me, was that the developers were openly admitting that they now trust GPT-5 to develop their software MORE than themselves ("more often than not, we defer to what GPT-5 says"). Why would you be proud of this?
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#8The messaging is all over the place anyway. Not so long ago OAI was talking about faster iterations and warning people to not expect huge leaps. (A position that makes sense imo). Yet people talk about AGI in a serious manner?
I don't think anyone serious is talking about AGI from LLMs, no.
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#9Issues like this are why I don't use ai agents for code. I don't want to sift through the bullshit confidently spewed out by the model. It doesn't understand anything. It can't possibly "understand my codebase". It can only predict tokens, and it can only be useful if the pattern has been seen before. Even then, it will product buggy replicas, which I've pointed out during demos. I disabled the ai helpers in my IDEs…
There is a threshold that every developer needs for them to make it be worth their time. For me that has already been met. Your comment makes me think that you don't believe it will start producing higher quality code than you anytime soon.
I think most of us are in the camp that even though we don't need AI right now we believe we will not be valuable in the near future without being highly proficient with the tooling.
Re: The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning
#10> They admitted that they were, and I am not lying about this, paywalling chat colors . […] This is a feature that a company adds when they are out of ideas This observation + sherlocking cursor suggests that perhaps sherlocking is the ideation strategy. Curious to see if they’re subsidizing token costs specifically to farm and Sherlock ideas
Yeah, I agree with the OP here. After all this time, being able to change the chat colors at this point has some real We-reached-the-bottom-of-the-backlog energy, and they're just now implementing the ideas that weren't considered important enough before by the PMs to consider.
It hardly feels like a next generation release.
As a related anecdote (not saying that this is industry standard, just pointing out my own experience), the startup I work for launched their app four years ago, and, for all four of those years, we've had "Implement a Dark Mode design" sitting at the bottom of our own backlog. Higher priority feature requests are always pre-empting it.