ChatGPT-5's Fumble

So, GPT-5 has finally landed. After months of Altman’s “hot AI summer” hype and a flurry of Reddit threads that would make even the most seasoned community manager weep, we’ve got our hands on the much-anticipated upgrade. But is it a revolution, or just another incremental tick on the AI odometer?

Let’s start with the obvious: if you’re into coding, GPT-5 is a bit of a marvel. The speed is impressive, and the model-switching 'router' – which picks the right reasoning or chat engine for the job – is clever. For developers, it’s a genuine productivity booster. But for the rest of us, especially those in property, portals, or proptech, the leap isn’t quite as seismic as the hype merchants would have us believe.

The front-end experience, while slick, doesn’t feel like the game-changer we were promised. Yes, it’s quick. Yes, it’s clever. But for most general use cases – the sort that estate agents, portal managers or business leaders might actually care about – it’s more “nice to have” than “must have”. The coding crowd are rightly excited, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit of a shrug.

What’s more interesting, frankly, is what happened earlier in the month: OpenAI’s 'open source' release. For those who missed it, ChatGPT-OSS is a genuinely big deal. For the first time, you can download a powerful reasoning model, run it locally on your own hardware, and keep your data entirely private. No cloud, no broadband, no 5G – just you and your machine. For the property sector, where client confidentiality and data security are paramount, this is a watershed moment. Imagine running advanced AI on your own laptop, with no risk of sensitive information leaking into someone else’s training set. That’s the sort of innovation that could genuinely shift the dial for agents and proptech firms alike.

The open source move also finally makes OpenAI live up to its name. Free, powerful, and genuinely open – it’s a far cry from the walled gardens we’ve become used to. And with the prospect of other models being released in this way, we’re looking at a future where local, secure AI becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Add to that, the release of ChatGPT-Agent in mid-July and I'd say that ChatGPT-5 isn't even the second-best ChatGPT of the last month. Agent - as we've discussed before - is going to make so much of what you do automatable. That is an insanely huge deal.

So, yes, GPT-5 is good. It’s fast, it’s clever, and it’ll only get better. But the real story this month isn’t the shiny new model – it’s the quiet revolution of open source AI, and what that means for security, privacy, and control in the property world. Oh, and an automation machine demand.

For agents and business leaders, these are the bits to watch. The rest is just noise – albeit very clever, very helpful noise.