It has been lower than per week for the reason that launch of OpenAI’s new GPT-5 AI mannequin, and the rollout hasn’t been a clean one. Up to now, the discharge sparked one of the vital intense person revolts in ChatGPT’s historical past, forcing CEO Sam Altman to make an uncommon public apology and reverse key selections.
On the coronary heart of the controversy has been OpenAI’s choice to routinely take away entry to all earlier AI fashions in ChatGPT (roughly 9, relying on the way you rely them) when GPT-5 rolled out to person accounts. In contrast to API customers who obtain advance discover of mannequin deprecations, shopper ChatGPT customers had no warning that their most popular fashions would disappear in a single day, famous unbiased AI researcher Simon Willison in a weblog submit.
The issues began instantly after GPT-5’s August 7 debut. A Reddit thread titled “GPT-5 is horrible” rapidly amassed over 4,000 feedback full of customers expressing frustration over the brand new launch. By August 8, social media platforms had been flooded with complaints about efficiency points, persona modifications, and the compelled removing of older fashions.
Previous to the launch of GPT-5, ChatGPT Professional customers may choose between 9 completely different AI fashions, together with Deep Analysis. (This screenshot is from Could 14, 2025, and OpenAI later changed o1 professional with o3-pro.)
Credit score:
Benj Edwards
Advertising and marketing professionals, researchers, and builders all shared examples of damaged workflows on social media. “I’ve spent months constructing a system to work round OpenAI’s ridiculous limitations in prompts and reminiscence points,” wrote one Reddit person within the r/OpenAI subreddit. “And in lower than 24 hours, they’ve made it ineffective.”
How may completely different AI language fashions break a workflow? It is as a result of every one is educated otherwise, and every contains its personal distinctive output type. Customers have developed units of prompts that produce helpful outcomes optimized for every AI mannequin.
For instance, Willison wrote how completely different person teams had developed distinct workflows with particular AI fashions in ChatGPT over time, quoting one Reddit person who defined: “I do know GPT-5 is designed to be stronger for advanced reasoning, coding, {and professional} duties, however not all of us want a professional coding mannequin. A few of us depend on 4o for inventive collaboration, emotional nuance, roleplay, and different long-form, high-context interactions.”
