After a lengthy hype cycle, OpenAI finally unveiled GPT-5 last week, with CEO Sam Altman promising “legitimate PhD-level” expertise from the AI model. But the launch of GPT-5 meant the demise of older OpenAI models, prompting users to flood social media with complaints about disruptions to their workflows and even their mental health.
The backlash prompted OpenAI to revive the model picker, bringing back GPT-4o. At first, the company restricted access to $200/month Pro users, but it’s now open to $20/month Plus users, too. Some users on social media called for access to GPT-4o to be extended to all users, but free users are still out of luck.
It’s unclear how long this access will last. “We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for,” CEO Sam Altman tweeted on Friday.
(Credit: Reddit)
Losing access to older GPTs isn’t the only issue facing GPT-5. Some say the model is “sterile” and “doesn’t feel the same.”
PCMag highlighted several drawbacks of the new model compared with previous iterations, including failing to correctly identify the number of times “B” appears in the word blueberry. In a Reddit question-and-answer session, Altman even admitted that GPT-5 seems “way dumber” than expected, though he promised that the tool will soon “seem smarter.”
(Credit: PCMag)
Nostalgia for bygone chatbots is certainly something that has only emerged recently, but it could be becoming a trend. Roughly 200 AI enthusiasts held a funeral for Anthropic’s recently phased-out Claude 3 Sonnet earlier this week, according to Wired (though many attendees were associated with the company).
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The reaction to GPT-5 seemed to surprise Altman, who noted that it makes him “uneasy” to “imagine a future where a lot of people really trust ChatGPT’s advice for their most important decisions.” Still, he’s confident “we have a good shot at getting this right,” in part because “we have much better tech to help us measure how we are doing than previous generations of technology had.”
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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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About Will McCurdy
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