OpenAI promised a revolution with its new artificial intelligence, GPT-5. What users got was a firestorm. The launch sparked outrage over diminished quality, a loss of personality, and the sudden removal of user control. The backlash from developers and paying customers was so severe it forced a public apology from the company’s CEO, exposing a deep crisis of trust for the world’s leading AI lab.
This is San Francisco. A developer, fingers poised over a keyboard, asks the new intelligence for a block of code. The response arrives fast. But it is short. Incomplete. He asks again, prodding. The machine, once a witty and tireless partner, now feels like a bland corporate assistant, its personality gone overnight. He is not alone. The arrival of GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence model, was not the triumph the company promised. It was, for many, a “horrible” and “awful” downgrade. On forums like Reddit and Hacker News, the places where technology’s true believers gather, the reaction was swift and sharp. Users reported that the new model, hyped as a major leap forward, felt sterile and less creative. Its answers were shorter, its reasoning sometimes worse than its predecessor, GPT-4o.
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