GPT‑5 Review: The AI Boss Battle Nobody Asked For

Hello everyone. So, GPT‑5 has arrived, fists raised, cape fluttering in the synthetic wind, promising to be the smartest, fastest, most useful model yet. They’re calling it “our smartest model yet” as though that is not the default claim every time there’s a version number bump. But sure — let’s roll this d20 and pray for something higher than a 3 in “actual usefulness.”

The Sales Pitch: Now With Thinking™ Built In

The marketing spiel is dripping across the board with pompous declarations: GPT‑5 is not just smarter in one area, oh no, it’s smarter in all of them. Science? Yes. Finance? Sure. Law? Why not. It’s basically an army of experts in one tidy package. Which sounds great — until you realise we’ve been here before with similar claims and a distinct lack of magical AI wizards appearing in our living rooms.

The screenshots and mockups are laughably slick — gradients as far as the eye can see. You’ve got apps for tracking your dreams, toast-writing helpers that look straight out of a wedding-planner fever dream, and a helpful AI ready to tell you your “snake plant” is actually a cactus. That last one wins points for passive-aggressive bot sass, I’ll give it that.

Deep Thinking or Just Longer Loading Times?

Apparently, this new model “thinks deeply” when you need it to, which is either a euphemism for “takes a while to respond” or “writes increasingly long paragraphs pretending to be profound.” As a coding collaborator it claims to deliver usable code end-to-end, better designs, and improved debugging. Fantastic. Until it hallucinates function calls like some fever-crazed NPC charging into the wrong dungeon. Less prone to hallucinations, they say. Translation: still hallucinates, just maybe less often.

New “Wow” Features That Are Just… Fine

• Make It Your Own: Choose a personality and chat colour. Weapon skins for your chatbot, basically.
• Voice Improvements: It now follows instructions better and changes speaking style. That’s nice, assuming the voice doesn’t sound like it’s narrating a morgue tour.
• Study Mode: Step-by-step personalised tutoring. Prepare for endless “Based on your learning style…” introductions.
• Connect GMail & Calendar: You can now give your AI access to your personal life so it can remind you that you’ve missed yet another Zoom call you didn’t want to attend.

For Developers: “Minimal Reasoning” — Yes, They Said That

For the dev crowd, we have “minimal reasoning” — which frankly sounds like my old guild leader explaining raid tactics while half-conscious. Supposedly, it can generate full UI, handle long chains of tool calls, and adjust verbosity. That last one is code for “this thing will still talk your ear off unless you tell it otherwise.”

For Business: Now With Extra Corporate Buzzwords

In business mode, GPT‑5 is a “trusted subject-matter expert” that “feels like collaborating with a smart colleague.” Which would be lovely — if that colleague didn’t occasionally make up information like an overconfident intern working their first day. It will allegedly absorb your company context, respect permissions, and work with your files. This is great. Until Janet from finance connects the wrong spreadsheet, and suddenly the bot thinks you earn $9M a year and should lay off half the company.

The Verdict

The truth? GPT‑5 is an upgrade. It’s smarter. It’s faster. It’s capable of more complex outputs, and it’s undeniably more refined than its predecessors. That said, the shameless marketing sugar‑coat tries to sell mundane QoL improvements as the next digital Renaissance. This is not your transcendent omniscient AI god. It’s a sleek new mount skin on the same game you’ve been grinding for years — useful, but not revolutionary.

Do I like it? Sure, in the way a doctor appreciates sharper scalpels — it makes the work smoother, but it doesn’t fundamentally rewrite medical science. Will it replace humans? No. Will it replace a lot of bad AI models? Absolutely. And that’s worth something.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Source: GPT-5, https://openai.com/gpt-5/