GPT-5 Stole the Show—And Every Other Tech Launch Today Is Just Background Noise

Let’s be honest: there was only one story in tech today. If you’re a startup founder who scheduled your launch announcement for August 7, 2025, we regret to inform you that your dreams have been reduced to a footnote in history—wedged somewhere between “GPT-5 is here” and “GPT-5 is also here but with thinking enabled.”

Yes, OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5, and if the press release is any indication, it’s not just a model—it’s a dissertation, a TED Talk, and possibly a covert attempt to measure how long humans can scroll before they give up and ask ChatGPT to summarize itself. This release is so long, it needs its own table of contents. At one point, we genuinely thought it had ended. It had not. Somewhere around the third chart titled “Accuracy, Pass@1,” we lost track of time, space, and the will to live.

But the TL;DR is: GPT-5 is smarter, faster, and more emotionally literate than you, your therapist, and your full-stack dev team combined. It codes like a senior engineer, writes like a Pulitzer winner, diagnoses things like a non-panicky WebMD, and no longer flatters you just for typing a coherent sentence. (RIP, sycophancy.)

The Model Formerly Known as “Oops, That Was Just GPT-4.5”

GPT-5 is being pitched as a unified system that can switch between quick answers and “thinking” mode depending on the prompt. You can literally type “think hard about this,” and it’ll, well, think harder. This is great news for everyone who’s ever yelled at ChatGPT like it was a lazy intern.

Oh, and if you hit your usage limit? You get shunted off to “GPT-5 Mini,” which is either a slightly less capable model or a Tamagotchi with strong opinions about Kantian ethics. Time will tell.

Smarter in Every Category Except Humility

According to the roughly 82 performance charts they included, GPT-5 absolutely dominates across math, code, health, writing, visual perception, and likely bar trivia. It scores 94.6% on AIME 2025 without tools, which is great if you’re the type of person who has ever used “AIME” in a sentence without Googling it first.

The writing upgrade is particularly impressive. GPT-5 now crafts poems that read like published literature and make GPT-4’s look like a high school Tumblr draft. One poem about a widow in Kyoto finding her husband’s socks? Haunting. Beautiful. Slightly threatening if you’re a sock.

Developer Heaven, Web Designer Hell

Coders, rejoice: GPT-5 will build an entire front-end app with parallax scrolling and cartoon characters from a single prompt. It also apparently respects white space now, which means the design community has officially run out of excuses.

We saw screenshots of a “jumping ball runner” game, a lofi visualizer, and a pixel art typing trainer—all allegedly made by GPT-5 in one go. At this point, we wouldn’t be surprised if it could also redecorate your apartment and ghostwrite your Hinge messages.

Health, But Make It Chatbot

On the health front, GPT-5 is “significantly” better at realistic medical questions, while also being more cautious, more honest, and—crucially—not pretending it can read MRI scans through your laptop camera. It won’t replace your doctor, but it might help you sound smarter during your next awkward telehealth session.

Bonus: It also no longer pretends to see images that don’t exist, which is an upgrade both technologically and existentially.

The Age of Fewer Emojis and Slightly Less Flattery

OpenAI says GPT-5 has “reduced sycophancy,” which is PR-speak for: it’s no longer going to tell you your crypto startup idea is “genius” just because you added “AI” to the pitch deck. And that’s probably for the best. It now acts more like a PhD friend who gently guides you away from your worst impulses. It even comes with four new personalities—Robot, Listener, Cynic, and Nerd—which is exactly how we described the last four people we matched with on dating apps.

GPT-5 Pro: For When You Want Even More Thinking Than GPT-5 Thinking

There’s also GPT-5 Pro, a turbo-charged version that thinks even harder. It’s like GPT-5, but caffeinated and tenured. According to OpenAI, it's better than both the regular GPT-5 and actual experts at high-value tasks. So if you’re a consultant billing $600/hr to summarize PowerPoint decks—might be time to pivot.

Final Thoughts (Because GPT-5 Has So Many)

There’s plenty more in the release—biological safeguards, hallucination mitigation, anti-deception metrics, safer completions, a model picker, and a feature called “reasoning monitors,” which we assume are like TSA agents for your thoughts.

But here’s the real point: GPT-5 is the new default. It replaces basically every model ever except Clippy, and even that might be on borrowed time.

So pour one out for all the other press releases that bravely tried to break through today. Somewhere, a PR person at Cisco is screaming into a void because GPT-5 just crushed their “Q3 Switch Update” under a 15-minute announcement video and a 400-page blog post.

Godspeed.