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Earlier this week, we saw the rollout of GPT-5, the latest and supposedly greatest edition of OpenAI’s flagship tool, with CEO Sam Altman claiming it offers “legitimate PhD-level” expertise in every field.
But the launch of GPT-5 means the demise of older OpenAI models, including GPT-4o, o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4.5. Many users have taken to social media to complain about how that's disrupted their workflows, and in one case, even their mental health.
The backlash has prompted OpenAI to revive the model picker, bringing back GPT-4o. At first, the company restricted access to $200/month Pro users, but it's now open to $20/month Plus users, too. Some users on social media called for access to GPT-4o to be extended to all users, but Free users are still out of luck.
It's unclear how long this access will last. "We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for," CEO Sam Altman tweeted.
(Credit: Reddit)Losing access to older GPTs isn't the only issue facing GPT-5. Some say the model is "sterile" and "doesn't feel the same."
PCMag highlighted several drawbacks of the new model compared with previous iterations, including failing to correctly identify the number of times "B" appears in the word blueberry. In a Reddit question-and-answer session, Altman even admitted that GPT-5 seems "way dumber" than expected, though he promised that the tool will soon "seem smarter."
(Credit: PCMag)Nostalgia for bygone chatbots is certainly something that has only emerged recently, but it could be becoming a trend. Roughly 200 AI enthusiasts held a funeral for Anthropic's recently phased-out Claude 3 Sonnet earlier this week, according to Wired (though many attendees were associated with the company).
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.