GPT-5 is as generative (dumb) as always

Sam Altman recently claimed that “GPT-5 is smarter than us in almost every way.”

The release of OpenAI’s latest model has been feverishly awaited by the AI community, with company executives boasting about its ability to write “entire computer programmes,” encapsulate software-on-demand, and represent a “significant step along our path to AGI” – all available “in your pocket”.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, offered a more measured perspective:

“[GPT-5] is an improvement: faster, more accurate, cleaner. It does better on most of the metrics than OpenAI’s previous models. But it’s not the breakthrough over GPT-4 that GPT-4 was over GPT-3. It’s also not AGI or ASI.”

AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, is born out of our tendency to look ten miles ahead, while ignoring the chasms of inconsistency in front of us. It is typically defined as a “hypothetical” form of AI that can understand, learn, and apply intelligence to any intellectual task a human can. Despite its speculative nature, AGI continues to fuel debates about whether AI could ever be conscious, or think and feel like humans do.

To claim that a large language model is a step toward AGI is not only premature – it misses the real purpose of generative models.

“[GPT-5] is as generative (dumb) as always,” read a Slack message from our founder, Jay van Zyl. At ecosystem.Ai, we are under no illusion: the association between artificial intelligence and actual intelligence is partly investment hype, partly clickbait.

With countless AI tools flooding the market, it’s easy to get swept up in disruptive claims from the likes of Sam Altman. But the reality is this: the true advantages of AI only emerge when it operates within an ecosystem. Without an ecosystem of technologies, AI tools solve isolated problems – but they constitute no more than quick fixes. And once you buy every AI product to solve every problem, your AI stack becomes a technical nightmare.

Explore how ecosystem.Ai’s architecture allows access to a world of AI capabilities, without the complexity in our recent architecture tours:

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