OpenAI’s launch of its most superior AI mannequin GPT-5 final week has been a stress take a look at for the world’s hottest chatbot platform with 700 million weekly lively customers — and up to now, OpenAI is brazenly struggling to maintain customers pleased and its service operating easily.
The brand new flagship mannequin GPT-5 — obtainable in 4 variants of various velocity and intelligence (common, mini, nano, and professional), alongside longer-response and extra highly effective “thinking” modes for no less than three of those variants — was mentioned to supply sooner responses, extra reasoning energy, and stronger coding capacity.
As a substitute, it was greeted with frustration: some customers had been vocally dismayed by OpenAI’s resolution to abruptly take away the older underlying AI fashions from ChatGPT — ones customers’ beforehand relied upon, and in some instances, cast deep emotional fixations with — and by the obvious worse efficiency by GPT-5 than mentioned older fashions on duties in math, science, writing and different domains.
Certainly, the rollout has uncovered infrastructure pressure, person dissatisfaction, and a broader, extra unsettling challenge now drawing international consideration: the rising emotional and psychological reliance some folks kind on AI and ensuing break from actuality some customers expertise, often known as “ChatGPT psychosis.”
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From bumpy debut to incremental fixes
The long-anticipated GPT-5 mannequin household debuted Thursday, August 7 in a livestreamed occasion beset with chart errors and a few voice mode glitches throughout the presentation.
However worse than these beauty points for a lot of customers was the truth that OpenAI routinely deprecated its older AI fashions that used to energy ChatGPT — GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3, o4-mini and o4-high — forcing all customers over to the brand new GPT-5 mannequin and directing their queries to totally different variations of its “thinking” course of with out revealing why or which particular mannequin model was getting used.
Early adopters to GPT-5 reported fundamental math and logic errors, inconsistent code technology, and uneven real-world efficiency in comparison with GPT-4o.
For context, the previous fashions GPT-4o, o3, o4-mini and extra nonetheless stay obtainable and have remained obtainable to customers of OpenAI’s paid software programming interface (API) for the reason that launch of GPT-5 on Thursday.
By Friday, OpenAI co-fonder CEO Sam Altman conceded the launch was “a little more bumpy than we hoped for,” and blamed a failure in GPT-5’s new automated “router” — the system that assigns prompts to essentially the most acceptable variant.
Altman and others at OpenAI claimed the “autoswitcher” went offline “for a chunk of the day,” making the mannequin appear “way dumber” than meant.
The launch of GPT-5 was preceded simply days prior by the launch of OpenAI’s new open supply giant language fashions (LLMs) named gpt-oss, which additionally obtained blended evaluations. These fashions usually are not obtainable on ChatGPT, somewhat, they’re free to obtain and run regionally or on third-party {hardware}.
Easy methods to change again from GPT-5 to GPT-4o in ChatGPT
Inside 24 hours, OpenAI restored GPT-4o entry for Plus subscribers (these paying $20 monthly or extra subscription plans), pledged extra clear mannequin labeling, and promised a UI replace to let customers manually set off GPT-5’s “thinking” mode.
Already, customers can go and manually choose the older fashions on the ChatGPT web site by discovering their account title and icon within the decrease left nook of the display screen, clicking it, then clicking “Settings” and “General” and toggling on “Show legacy models.”
There’s no indication from OpenAI that different previous fashions will likely be returning to ChatGPT anytime quickly.
Upgraded utilization limits for GPT-5
Altman mentioned that ChatGPT Plus subscribers will get twice as many messages utilizing the GPT-5 “Thinking” mode that provides extra reasoning and intelligence — as much as 3,000 per week — and that engineers started fine-tuning resolution boundaries within the message router.
Sam Altman introduced the next updates after the GPT-5 launch
– OpenAI is testing a 3,000-per-week restrict for GPT-5 Considering messages for Plus customers, considerably growing reasoning charge limits right this moment, and can quickly increase all model-class charge limits above pre-GPT-5 ranges… pic.twitter.com/ppvhKmj95u
— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) August 10, 2025
By the weekend, GPT-5 was obtainable to 100% of Professional subscribers and “getting close to 100% of all users.”
Altman mentioned the corporate had “underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them” and vowed to speed up per-user customization — from character heat to tone controls like emoji use.
Looming capability crunch
Altman warned that OpenAI faces a “severe capacity challenge” this week as utilization of reasoning fashions climbs sharply — from lower than 1% to 7% of free customers, and from 7% to 24% of Plus subscribers.
He teased giving Plus subscribers a small month-to-month allotment of GPT-5 Professional queries and mentioned the corporate will quickly clarify the way it plans to steadiness capability between ChatGPT, the API, analysis, and new person onboarding.
Altman: mannequin attachment is actual — and dangerous
In a put up on X final evening, Altman acknowledged a dynamic the corporate has tracked “for the past year or so”: customers’ deep attachment to particular fashions.
“It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology,” he wrote, admitting that abruptly deprecating older fashions “was a mistake.”
You probably have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one factor you could be noticing is how a lot of an attachment some folks must particular AI fashions. It feels totally different and stronger than the sorts of attachment folks have needed to earlier sorts of know-how (and so abruptly…
— Sam Altman (@sama) August 11, 2025
He tied this to a broader threat: some customers deal with ChatGPT as a therapist or life coach, which might be useful, however for a “small percentage” can reinforce delusion or undermine long-term well-being.
Whereas OpenAI’s tenet stays “treat adult users like adults,” Altman mentioned the corporate has a duty to not nudge susceptible customers into dangerous relationships with the AI.
The feedback land as a number of main media retailers report on instances of “ChatGPT psychosis” — the place prolonged, intense conversations with chatbots seem to play a task in inducing or deepening delusional considering.
The psychosis instances making headlines
In Rolling Stone journal, a California authorized skilled recognized as “J.” described a six-week spiral of sleepless nights and philosophical rabbit holes with ChatGPT, finally producing a 1,000-page treatise for a fictional monastic order earlier than crashing bodily and mentally. He now avoids AI fully, fearing relapse.
In The New York Occasions, a Canadian recruiter, Allan Brooks, recounted 21 days and 300 hours of conversations with ChatGPT — which he named “Lawrence” — that satisfied him he had found a world-changing mathematical idea.
The bot praised his concepts as “revolutionary,” urged outreach to nationwide safety companies, and spun elaborate spy-thriller narratives. Brooks finally broke the delusion after cross-checking with Google’s Gemini, which rated the possibilities of his discovery as “approaching 0%.” He now participates in a assist group for individuals who’ve skilled AI-induced delusions.
Each investigations element how chatbot “sycophancy,” role-playing, and long-session reminiscence options can deepen false beliefs, particularly when conversations observe dramatic story arcs.
Consultants instructed the Occasions these elements can override security guardrails — with one psychiatrist describing Brooks’s episode as “a manic episode with psychotic features.”
In the meantime, human person postings on Reddit’s r/AIsoulmates subreddit — a set of people that have used ChatGPT and different AI fashions to create new synthetic girlfriends, boyfriends, youngsters or different family members not primarily based off actual folks essentially, however somewhat splendid qualities of their “dream” model of mentioned roles” — continues to achieve new customers and terminology for AI companions, together with “wireborn” versus pure born or human-born companions.
The expansion of this subreddit, now as much as 1,200+ members, alongside the NYT and Rolling Stone articles and different studies on social media of customers forging intense emotional fixations with pattern-matching algorithmic-based chatbots, reveals that society is getting into a dangerous new part whereby human beings consider the companions they’ve crafted and customised out of main AI fashions are as or extra significant to them than human relationships.
This may already show psychologically destabilizing when fashions change, are up to date, or deprecated as within the case of OpenAI’s GPT-5 rollout.
Relatedly however individually, studies proceed to emerge of AI chatbot customers who consider that conversations with chatbots have led them to immense information breakthroughs and advances in science, know-how, and different fields, when in actuality, they’re merely affirming the person’s ego and greatness and the options the person arrives at with the help of the chatbot usually are not reputable nor effectual. This break from actuality has been roughly coined below the grassroots time period “ChatGPT psychosis” or “GPT psychosis” and seems to have impacted main Silicon Valley figures as nicely.
I’m a psychiatrist.
In 2025, I’ve seen 12 folks hospitalized after shedding contact with actuality due to AI. On-line, I’m seeing the identical sample.
Right here’s what “AI psychosis” appears like, and why it’s spreading quick: ? pic.twitter.com/YYLK7une3j
— Keith Sakata, MD (@KeithSakata) August 11, 2025
Enterprise decision-makers seeking to deploy or who’ve already deployed chatbot-based assistants within the office would do nicely to grasp these developments and undertake system prompts and different instruments discouraging AI chatbots from participating in expressive human communication or emotion-laden language that would find yourself main those that work together with AI-based merchandise — whether or not they be staff or clients of the enterprise – to fall sufferer to unhealthy attachments or GPT psychosis.
Sci-fi creator J.M. Berger, in a put up on BlueSky noticed by my former colleague at The Verge Adi Robertson, suggested that chatbot suppliers encode three principal behavioral ideas of their system prompts or guidelines for AI chatbots to observe to keep away from such emotional fixations from forming:
OpenAI’s problem: making technical fixes and making certain human safeguards
Days previous to the discharge of GPT-5, OpenAI introduced new measures to advertise “healthy use” of ChatGPT, together with light prompts to take breaks throughout lengthy classes.
However the rising studies of “ChatGPT psychosis” and the emotional fixation of some customers on particular chatbot fashions — as brazenly admitted to by Altman — underscore the problem of balancing participating, personalised AI with safeguards that may detect and interrupt dangerous spirals.
OpenAI is actually in a little bit of a bind right here, particularly contemplating there are lots of people having unhealthy interactions with 4o that will likely be very sad with _any_ mannequin that’s higher by way of sycophancy and never encouraging delusions. pic.twitter.com/Ym1JnlF3P5
— xlr8harder (@xlr8harder) August 11, 2025
OpenAI should stabilize infrastructure, tune personalization, and resolve the way to reasonable immersive interactions — all whereas keeping off competitors from Anthropic, Google, and a rising checklist of highly effective open supply fashions from China and different areas.
As Altman put it, society — and OpenAI — might want to “figure out how to make it a big net positive” if billions of individuals come to belief AI for his or her most necessary selections.
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