GPT-5 at its strongest is as good as any model we've seen from any provider. However, while these models aren't parrots, they are most definitely stochastic. All it takes is for a few influencers and journalists to experience a few conspicuous failures, and you get articles like this one and a growing (if unjustified) perception that the GPT-5 launch is a "flop."
I think their principal mistake was in conflating the introduction of GPT-5 with the model-selection heuristics they started using at the same time. Whatever empirical hacks they came up with to determine how much thinking should be applied to a given prompt are not working well. Then there's the immediate-but-not-really deprecation of the other models. It should have been very clear that the image-based tests that the CNN reporter referred to were not running on GPT-5 at all. But it wasn't, and that's a big marketing communications failure on OpenAI's part.
One of several, for anyone who sat through their presentation.
I think their principal mistake was in conflating the introduction of GPT-5 with the model-selection heuristics they started using at the same time. Whatever empirical hacks they came up with to determine how much thinking should be applied to a given prompt are not working well. Then there's the immediate-but-not-really deprecation of the other models. It should have been very clear that the image-based tests that the CNN reporter referred to were not running on GPT-5 at all. But it wasn't, and that's a big marketing communications failure on OpenAI's part.
One of several, for anyone who sat through their presentation.