Ok this[0] sounds very, uh bold to me? Surely this is going to break a ton of workflows etc seemingly with nearly no notice? I'm assuming 'launches' equates with 'fully rolls out' or something but it's not that clear to me.
When GPT-5 launches, several older models will be retired, including:
- GPT-4o
- GPT-4.1
- GPT-4.5
- GPT-4.1-mini
- o4-mini
- o4-mini-high
- o3
- o3-pro
If you open a conversation that used one of these models, ChatGPT will automatically switch it to the closest GPT-5 equivalent. Chats with 4o, 4.1, 4.5, 4.1-mini, o4-mini, or o4-mini-high will open in GPT-5, chats with o3 will open in GPT-5-Thinking, and chats with o3-Pro will open in GPT-5-Pro (available only on Pro and Team).
> For Free and Plus users, these changes take effect immediately. Pro, Team, and Enterprise users will also see the changes at launch but will have access to older models through legacy model settings.
So only for free/plus users (for now). I do wonder how long they will take to deprecate these models via API though...
So they confirmed what we've all been speculating: this is a cost saving update
Smaller base models + more RL. Technically better at the verticals that are making money, but worse on subjective preference.
They'll probably try to prompt engineer back in some of the "vibes", hence the personalities. But also maybe they decided people spending $20 a month to hammer 4o all day as a friend (no judgement, really) are ok to tick off for now... and judging by Reddit, they are very ticked off.
This behavior should be an early warning sign of future potential enshitification and a reason to consider open weight models you can host elsewhere.
If you are building on models that could disappear tomorrow when a company needs to juice the launch of a new model (or increase prices), you are introducing avoidable risk.
Doesn't matter at all if the newer model is earth-shatteringly good (and this one doesn't seem to be): If I can't reliably access the models I've built my tooling on top of... I'm very unhappy.
If this note is just intended for the GUI chat interface they provide - Fine. I don't love it, but I get it.
But if the older models start disappearing from the paid API surfaces (ex - I can no longer get to a precise snapshot through something like "gpt-4o-2024-08-06" or "gpt-3.5-turbo-1106") then this is a great reason to abandon OpenAI entirely as a platform.
> For Free and Plus users, these changes take effect immediately. Pro, Team, and Enterprise users will also see the changes at launch but will have access to older models through legacy model settings.
I don't think they build the ChatGPT subscription interface around workflows. They leave the APIs to cover either custom or pre-built workflows pinned against a specific model. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if they do end up keeping a couple of the cheaper/smaller older models though, the cost would be low and reduce a lot of the churn friction.
I'm not saying I'd do it that way myself, but it explains why they don't see it as too bold.
"Worse" model is largely subjective. Often, task specific.
For me, I find model upgrades frustrating as they often break subtle things about my workflows while not clearly offering an improvement. It takes time to learn the nuances of each model and tweak your prompts to get the best outputs.
For example, Sonnet 4 is now my daily driver for Cursor - but it took me nearly a month to tweak my approaches I was using for 3.5 and 3.7.
