With my love of technology, I was naturally drawn to LLMs as soon as I found out about ChatGPT in 2023 with version 3.5. This new technology was and still is both mind-blowing when you think about it but also quite limiting at the time; it was a paradigm shift for sure.

Since this shift, we came far, but even with all-mighty powerful ChatGPT 5, I still feel like there’s quite a road ahead. I remember in the summer waiting for the next big release; everybody was talking about it like it’s going to be the next frontier. After launch, I’ve tried to push the model, and I wasn’t that impressed. It is definitely better than its 4o predecessor, but it isn’t mind-blowingly better. To be honest, for the day-to-day use, I’m not even sure how much better it is compared to 4o.

Today, I was learning about indie app marketing using ChatGPT’s Study mode. It got me thinking how bland some of the responses were. It didn’t feel like I was using the next-generation model; it felt like a bland 4o-mini-powered model without any good insights to give.

It’s probably true, as many people suggested, that the ChatGPT 5 is a cost optimization model rather than a pure performance one. I did get some interesting “cutting-edge” results with the Pro version, but the usage of it is quite limited. I can’t pinpoint exactly what was so good about it, and with my limited testing, it’s hard to say how it compares to other state-of-the-art models, but it felt more insightful, or maybe that’s just my bias towards a longer response.