Business AI

The Thursday release of GPT-5 brings together traditional and "reasoning" models and ups the ante in the race toward so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Driving the news: OpenAI is making the new model available Thursday for free and paid users, with enterprise and educational customers getting access starting next week.

Writing to a rubric involves thinking, but it’s an artificial form of thinking. The messier human mode is bypassed in favor of following a formula to gain a reward – a move to perverse incentives.

Once something can follow the formula faster, why not use it – a move with no incentive. This follows a broader path that moved higher education from a place of learning to a place of training. Students became trained to write before AI was given training data to help it ‘learn’ how to write essays for students.

13-Year-Old Arrested for Using ChatGPT in Class - What Every Parent and School Needs to Know

A 13-year-old student at Southwestern Middle School in Volusia County, Florida was arrested after typing into OpenAI’s ChatGPT during class. The school’s Gaggle system flagged his activity, police were notified, and the boy ended up in handcuffs and leg shackles - facing a night in juvenile detention and a court appearance.

the main improvements in GPT-5 included: fewer factual errors, or hallucinations; better software coding, allowing it to create functional websites and apps; increased capability at creative writing; and, rather than “refusing” a prompt that breaches its guidelines outright, the model will instead try to give the most helpful response possible within safety guidelines, or at least explain why it cannot help.

The agent feature in ChatGPT – which carries out tasks such as finding restaurant availability and shopping online – will also be able to access users’ Gmail, Google calendar and contacts, if given permission.

As with its predecessors, GPT-5 can generate voice, image and text and can deal with queries in those formats too.

OpenAI said the upgraded ChatGPT would be better at answering health-related questions and would be more proactive at “flagging potential concerns” – such as serious physical or mental illness.