OpenAI has unveiled ChatGPT-5, its most advanced AI model to date and it’s now freely available to users worldwide, as the race to dominate the artificial intelligence landscape continues to intensify. The new version, already attracting hundreds of millions of users weekly, is earning praise for its enhanced speed, improved intelligence, and broader capabilities across various tasks. OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman described the experience of using ChatGPT-5 as “like talking to a real expert,” adding that the model is “clearly a step closer to general intelligence.” While the model hasn’t yet achieved human-like reasoning, Altman believes it marks significant progress in that direction. The release comes amid fierce competition among tech giants striving to lead the rapidly evolving AI space. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT-5 is being used by nearly 700 million people each week and is now being rolled out globally at no cost to users. Altman, however, emphasized that more development is needed to reach true artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI capable of human-like thought. “This version doesn’t learn continuously from real-time interactions — and to me, that’s a core part of what AGI should be,” he said during a media briefing.“But the level of capability here is a huge improvement.” Industry experts have hailed the beginning of a new AI era — one in which intelligent machines change the way people live and work. “As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” wrote Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a recent internal memo. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity.” Altman said there were “orders of magnitude more gains” still to come on the road to AGI. “Obviously… you have to invest in compute power at an eye-watering rate to get there, but we intend to keep doing it,” he said. Tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s xAI have been investing billions of dollars into AI research and development since the launch of the first ChatGPT model in late 2022. Earlier this year, Chinese start-up DeepSeek surprised the AI sector by releasing a powerful model that delivers high performance using more affordable chips. PhD-level expert With fierce global competition in the AI space, Altman claimed that ChatGPT-5 is now leading the field in areas like coding, writing, healthcare and more. “GPT-3 felt like talking to a secondary school student — ask a question, you might get a correct answer or something completely off,” Altman said. “GPT-4 was more like speaking to a university student. GPT-5 is the first time it really feels like you’re chatting with a PhD-level expert on any topic.” Altman believes that “vibe-coding” — the ability to build software through natural conversation — will become a defining feature of the ChatGPT-5 era. British AI expert Simon Willison, who had early access to the model, wrote in a blog post: “My verdict: it’s just good at stuff. It doesn’t feel like a dramatic leap forward, but it rarely messes up — and often impresses.” However, Elon Musk claimed on X (formerly Twitter) that his own AI model, Grok 4 Heavy, was “smarter” than ChatGPT-5. Honest AI? According to OpenAI’s safety research lead Alex Beutel, ChatGPT-5 has been trained to be trustworthy and avoid aiding any harmful tasks. “We built evaluations to measure how often it may deceive, and trained the model to be honest,” Beutel said. The model is designed to produce “safe completions” — responses that avoid sharing sensitive or potentially dangerous information, he added. Also this week, OpenAI launched two new AI models that are freely available to download and customise, in a move aimed at challenging similar offerings from competitors. The release of these “open-weight language models” comes as the company faces growing calls to be more transparent, in line with its original mission as a non-profit organisation.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT-5, now available free for all users
