Who does your assistant serve?

Summary

Who does your assistant serve? Published on 2025-08-17, 4443 words, 17 minutes to read ChatGPT and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. A concrete walking path bifurcating greenery on either side of the frame. The summer heat has worn down on it, making it range from green to gold. The sky is partially cloudy. - Photo by Xe Iaso, iPhone 15 Pro Max After a year of rumors that GPT-5 was going to unveiled next week and the CEO of OpenAI hyping it up as "scary good" by tweeting pictures of the death star, OpenAI released their new model to the world with the worst keynote I've ever seen. Normally releases of big models like this are met with enthusiasm and excitement as OpenAI models tend to set the "ground floor expectation" for what the rest of the industry provides. But this time, the release wasn't met with the same universal acclaim that people felt for GPT-4. GPT-4 was such a huge breakthrough the likes of which we haven't really seen since. The launch of GPT-5 was so bad that it's revered with almost universal disdain. The worst part about the rollout is that the upgrade to GPT-5 was automatic and didn't include any way to roll back to the old model. Most of the time, changing out models is pretty drastic on an AI workflow. In my experience when I've done it I've had to restart from scratch with a new prompt and twiddle things until it worked reliably. The only time switching models has ever been relatively easy for me is when I switch between models in the same family (such as if you go from Qwen 3 30B to Qwen 3 235B). Every other time it's involved a lot of reworking and optimizing so that the model behaves like you'd expect it to. AI upgrades suck An upgrade this big to this many people is bound to have fundamental issues with how it'll be perceived. A new model has completely different vibes, and most users aren't really using it at the level where they can "just fix their prompts". However the GPT-5 upgrade ended up being hated by the co...