T o say that the public response to GPT-5 was lukewarm would be a massive understatement. Surprisingly, the technical capabilities of GPT-5 weren't the main cause of the backlash. Rather, many ChatGPT users were in mourning over the sudden loss of the previous model, GPT-4o.

Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company would be reinstating its GPT-4o model, just over 24 hours after declaring that its newfangled GPT-5 would be accompanied by the "deprecating" of all previous models.

The return of GPT-4o comes after what Altman described as OpenAI underestimating "how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them." In an attempt to simplify its offerings, OpenAI had initially removed all previous AI models from ChatGPT when GPT-5 launched on August 7,