Following the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan and a summer wave of new models — Grok 4, an updated Claude, and OpenAI’s open-source and agent variants — the AI community’s anticipation for the ChatGPT-5 livestream was unmistakable, if tinged with its usual overhype.

After a series of models (GPT 4.5, reasoning o1 and o3) failed to qualify to be assigned the moniker GPT5, the new de facto encompassing GPT5 was heralded with much fanfare. Heretofore, opinions on whether GPT-5 represented a genuine paradigm shift in AI have been sharply divided. Anyone trying to make sense of the myriad of analyses and use cases without experimenting with the model themselves is utterly unable to express an opinion.