Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that it was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit.

GPT-5 still represented the release of at least three distinct models: GPT-5-Fast, GPT-5-Thinking and GPT-5-Pro, at least two and likely all three of which are SoTA (state of the art) within their class, along with GPT-5-Auto.

The problem is that the release was so botched that OpenAI is now experiencing a Reverse DeepSeek Moment – all the forces that caused us to overreact to DeepSeek's r1 are now working against OpenAI in reverse.