5 Things You Need To Know About GPT-5

At the end of last week, we saw the launch of Chat GPT-5.

What do you really need to know? Well, after conducting a deep dive and experimenting with the model, these are my key takeaways for you.

1. Model switching - A big reason people get bad results with AI is often because they use the wrong model for the wrong task. This problem is now mostly solved. When you use GPT-5 and ask it a question, it automatically selects the right model to give you the best answer. E.G., If you ask it for an insight-driven campaign strategy that considers your brand’s history, target audience behaviour, competitive landscape, and media budget, it will now automatically switch to its “thinking model”. If you have a paid account, you can still switch it manually if you like.

2. Less prompt crafting required - It’s much better at reading in between the lines with your prompt and knowing what you really want, as opposed to before, when you really needed to craft your prompt to get the best result. My findings so far have been that you’ll still get better results with the extra craft, BUT for most people, this will help them get much better answers.

3. It’s much more accurate with facts (Fewer hallucinations) - Two things that used to really annoy me with older GPTs are how confidently they would tell me something was right when it was obviously wrong, and also that it would sometimes just make stuff up (sound familiar?). I’m happy to say this new model has a lot less of that. As you can see from the benchmark scores below, hallucination rates have gone from around 4-5% down to less than 1%! (compared to GPT o3). It’s also much more honest, it’s less likely now to double down on something wrong, and it will tell you when it can’t really do something, which is comforting.

4. It now connects to Gmail, Calendar and Drive - If you’re a Google Mail person, it can now (if you allow it) read your emails, check your calendar and read any files you want it to in Google Drive. To get this to work you need a paid account, you then need to enter the deep research mode and then “agent” mode and then make sure that you allow access to gmail etc in the sources section of the chat. I imagine they are being pretty cautious, hence why it’s a bit of a faff for now, but I am sure this will all be a daily tool for us all in likely 6-12 months. It’s great at doing things like finding emails you need to reply to and then suggesting replies, and I imagine this will get better and better (basically everyone will have a super-efficient PA soon).

5. It’s a much better coder and web designer - They worked a lot on this, it’s much faster, more accurate and better at reading in-between the lines of what you prompt (vibe coders will be happy). It’s also a lot better at design. Below is an image of a prompt given to GPT-5 in a demo, in 2-3 minutes, it had created a couple of pretty slick-looking working language learning app options! (Their practical suggestion for tasks like this was to run the same prompts in multiple tabs, then pick and fine-tune the one you like the most.)

So, is GPT-5 a game changer? The answer really is, sort of.

For most casual users, they will see some huge gains. It’s also cheaper to run, much more efficient (these models put massive strain on energy grids), and basically better in every measurable metric.

I think a lot of the use/or lack of use of AI tools is a user interface problem. A search bar interface is too vague for most people to know how best to use it. That’s why people can and do currently make a fortune out of skinning it to other specific tools and apps.

In one interview about GPT-5, Sam Altman (the OpenAI CEO) was asked how might this AI progress impact people leaving college in 5 years? (i.e. jobs are being made redundant, so what do they do).

He said: “Some categories of jobs will go away, but young people are the best at adapting to this. I would be more worried about the 62-year-old who refuses to re-train than the 22-year-old. If I were 22 and graduating, I would feel like I was the luckiest kid in history. Never has there been a more amazing time to go create something totally new. I think it’s now possible to create a one-person company that can go on to be worth $ 1 billion and deliver amazing products and services to the world. And that’s crazy! You now have access to tools that can enable you to create things that would take teams of 100s in the past.”

I think that’s a pretty good spot to end this for today. Good luck out there, play with these tools and if you ever need a hand, let us know or take our 42courses AI course :) Big love. Chris