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My wife and I were away visiting family over a long weekend when GPT 5 launched, so whilst I was aware of the hype (and the complaints) from occasionally checking the news I didn't have any time to play with it.

Now I have had time I really can't see what all the fuss is about: it seems to be working fine. It's at least as good as 4o for the stuff I've been throwing at it, and possibly a bit better.

On here, sober opinions about GPT 5 seem to prevail. Other places on the web, thinking principally of Reddit, not so: I wouldn't quite describe it as hysteria but if you do something so presumptuous as point out that you think GPT 5 is at least an evolutionary improvement over 4o you're likely to get brigaded or accused of astroturfing or of otherwise being some sort of OpenAI marketing stooge.

I don't really understand why this is happening. Like I say, I think GPT 5 is just fine. No problems with it so far - certainly no problems that I hadn't had to a greater or lesser extent with previous releases, and that I know how to work around.



GPT-5 is extremely "aligned", by which I mean that it will refuse to engage with anything even remotely controversial. I'd say it's worse than Claude in that regard. Whether you care or not depends a lot on what you're doing with it.

That aside, GPT-5 is also very passive. When using it in agentic applications specifically, it will frequently stop and ask for confirmation on absolutely trivial things.




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