OpenAI GPT-5 One Unified System

After such a long wait, is GPT-5 SOTA or something else?

Screenshot of GPT-5 Live event. August 7th, 2025.

Hey Everyone,

Welcome to another article from AI Supremacy, a Newsletter about AI at the intersection of tech, business, society and the future. Welcome to our new readers who are joining 170,000 others. Check the rising publications on our channel of Technology here. Welcome to join our new community.

• (Eds: Updated August 11th, 2025) I’ve updated this article with a lot more details, links and ongoing debates about GPT-5 for clarity.

Showcases

Full disclosure, community posts have tended towards more negative about GPT-5 than positive):

1. GPT-5 And Privacy by Design: Does OpenAI Care?

2. How ChatGPT accidentally became the fastest-growing product in history

3. GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it.

4. GPT-5 at Scale: Why Reliability Slipped

5. GPT-5 Disappoints

6. The Complete ChatGPT-5 Review: 5 Real-World Tests and the Playbook to Use It Right

7. OpenAI’s Open-Weight Models: Overhyped & Shockingly Underperforming

So I listened to OpenAI’s 1 hour live stream about GPT-5’s launch, watch it here. Here is the 3min recap (edited by C.Grennan).

GPT-5 Launch 3-min Recap

• In this article

  Raphaëlle d'Ornano
  and her team from Decoding Discontinuity (please skip the OpenAI summary to read if if you want) Newsletter will have some insights about OpenAI in the marketplace and their strategic evolution.

Some of GPT-5’s talking points are crazy exaggerated, but that’s the world we live in now, so please take some of these quotes with a grain of salt. This article is fairly long, so click on the title or click below to read it on the web (it will be easier to see the infographics).

(Like) “Having a team of PhDs in your pocket. “

• As of the second week of August, 2025 - GPT-5 is rolling out today to Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, with Enterprise and EDU next week.

• It tooks OpenAI 162 days to get from GPT-4.5 to GPT-5. GPT‑4.5 was officially released on February 27, 2025. But the wait for GPT-5 felt like years! That’s also because Anthropic, Google and Qwen caught up, and we haven’t even gotten DeepSeek-R2 yet.

• It took OpenAI, GPT-4 (March 14, 2023) to GPT-5 (August 7, 2025) a grand total of 877 days to get from GPT-4 to GPT-5.