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               GPT-5 Reduces the Need to Choose Models in ChatGPT

   Adam Engst

   In his One Useful Thing newsletter, [1]Ethan Mollick explains what's
   interesting about GPT-5:

     In general, AIs that "think" before answering (called Reasoners) are
     the best at hard problems. The longer they think, the better the
     answer, but thinking costs money and takes time. So OpenAI
     previously made the default ChatGPT use fast, dumb models, hiding
     the good stuff from most users. A surprising number of people have
     never seen what AI can actually do because they're stuck on GPT-4o,
     and don't know which of the confusingly-named models are better.

     GPT-5 does away with this by selecting models for you,
     automatically. GPT-5 is not one model as much as it is a switch that
     selects among multiple GPT-5 models of various sizes and abilities.

   It's nearly impossible (and largely unnecessary) to keep up with all
   the changes in the AI world, but OpenAI's release of GPT-5, the latest
   model to power[2]ChatGPT, seems worth acknowledging. Figuring out which
   chatbot you prefer is hard enough, but even after choosing, you have to
   decide which large language model to use for each conversation. ChatGPT
   has long defaulted to GPT-4o, which is fast and cheap but offers weaker
   answers than more expensive reasoning models like OpenAI o3, which can
   take 10'15 minutes to return an answer. With GPT-5, ChatGPT analyzes
   your prompt and decides on its own which of several models of various
   sizes and abilities to use.

   That's both good and bad. If you never ventured beyond GPT-4o, GPT-5
   automatically picking one of its more capable models could lead to much
   better responses. I believe this will be true for many users. On the
   other hand, if you carefully selected your models, you might be
   frustrated if GPT-5 chooses differently in a specific case. To
   accommodate such users, OpenAI lets you manually choose between GPT-5
   and the slower, more capable GPT-5 Thinking from the model pop-up menu
   at the top. Those who are pining for GPT-4o can turn on Show Legacy
   Models in ChatGPT's settings to access it as well.

   In theory, GPT-5's automatic model selection is where we want things to
   go because it allows the underlying models to improve while reducing
   the apparent change for change's sake that so often afflicts tech
   companies. If OpenAI can make it so that ChatGPT seems the same'we
   humans excel at detecting personality changes'while improving its
   performance and reasoning behind the scenes, that could help reduce the
   incidence of tech whiplash.

   Lastly, an Apple connection: [3]Apple told 9to5Mac that Siri will be
   able to access GPT-5 in OS 26, but not before. But if you want to
   talk to ChatGPT, do so directly in the ChatGPT app rather than playing
   Telephone with Siri.

   [4]Read original article

References

   Visible links
   1. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/gpt-5-it-just-does-stuff
   2. https://chatgpt.com/
   3. https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/07/apple-intelligence-gpt-5-chatgpt-integration/
   4. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/gpt-5-it-just-does-stuff

   Hidden links:
   5. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/08/GPT-5-legacy-selector.png

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