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20252020s
GPT-5 Launch
OpenAI released GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, unifying its GPT and o-series reasoning lines into a single flagship system.
Why It Mattered
GPT-5 replaced the confusing model-picker era with a unified system that automatically routes between fast responses and deeper reasoning, and was made available to free ChatGPT users on launch day — bringing frontier capability to hundreds of millions of people at once. As the long-awaited successor to GPT-4, its incremental rather than revolutionary reception also sparked wide debate about scaling limits, even as the GPT-5.x line became the backbone of OpenAI's subsequent rapid release cadence.
Who Built It
OpenAI
Applications
- General Assistance
- Coding
- Reasoning