Why GPT-5 was never going to impress you
🎯 Summary
[{“key_takeaways”=>[“GPT-5 felt evolutionary rather than revolutionary because human expectations constantly shift as AI capabilities improve.”, “The Turing Test is no longer a valid measure of machine intelligence because LLMs have easily surpassed it, leading to ‘shifting goalposts’ where solved problems cease to impress.”, “Rodney Brooks’ observation highlights that once a piece of AI is understood, it is dismissed as mere computation, removing the ‘magic’.”, “The negative space paradox dictates that as models become more reliable (e.g., dropping error rates from 10% to 1%), the remaining small gaps become more noticeable and frustrating.”, “A small error rate (like 1% hallucination) becomes highly problematic when applied across long, chained workflows, preventing full automation despite overall improvement.”, “Future major AI breakthroughs will likely require a paradigm shift in model building, not just incremental scaling, to generate a genuine ‘before and after’ moment.”, “The current trajectory suggests improvements will continue on a smooth curve, meaning users will likely remain unimpressed until a fundamentally new AI flavor arrives.”], “overview”=>”The underwhelming reception of GPT-5 stems from two inherent paradoxes of technological progress: the shifting goalposts of what constitutes intelligence and the negative space paradox, where improvements highlight remaining deficiencies. These dynamics ensure that even significant advancements, like GPT-5, are perceived as evolutionary rather than revolutionary because success redefines the benchmark. Consequently, true moments of awe in AI will likely require a fundamental paradigm shift in model architecture, similar to the impact of ChatGPT.”, “themes”=>[“The Paradoxes of Progress in AI”, “Shifting Benchmarks and Expectations (Turing Test)”, “The Negative Space Paradox and Reliability Gaps”, “The Nature of Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary AI Improvement”, “The Requirement for a Paradigm Shift in AI Architecture”]}]
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"But that 1% hallucination rate will show up time and again. Or consider a series of individual steps chained one to another. Imagine you've got a process with 25 steps. Well, a 1% hallucination rate means that each step succeeds 99 times out of 100. But across a chain of 25, it will mean one in five times. That chain will fail."
"Every time we figure out a piece of this, artificial intelligence, it stops being magical. People say, hey, that's just computation."
"I think we will need a paradigm shift in the way we build and deliver AI models and in what they can actually do."
"Shifting goal posts mean we redefine success as soon as it's achieved. Negative space means every improvement makes what is still missing even more obvious."
"The paradox of negative space is that progress makes the gaps stand out much more."
"GPT-5 could never have impressed us. It's because it falls between two paradoxes of progress."