Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 07/08 – GPT-5 Released

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

All the news around the big unveiling of GPT-5. President Trump calls on the CEO of Intel to “resign immediately.” Also, the threat of 100% tariffs on chips and semiconductors. But Apple gets a pass because they’re committing to building more in the US. Links: GPT-5 is being released to all ChatGPT users (The Verge) OpenAI Unveils GPT-5, Its Latest and Most Powerful Model, After Two-Year Wait (WSJ) OpenAI’s GPT-5 is here (TechCrunch) Trump Urges ‘Conflicted’ Intel CEO Tan to Resign Immediately (Bloomberg) Trump Eyes 100% Chips Tariff, Exempting Firms That Invest in US (Bloomberg) Apple Announces $100 Billion US Investment Ahead of Trump Event (Bloomberg) Could AI Datacenter Spending Blow Up The Economy? With Paul Kedrosky (YouTube) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Thursday, August 7th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the news around the big unveiling of GPT-5. President Trump calls on the CEO of Intel to resign immediately, also the threat of 100% tariffs on chips and semiconductors. But Apple gets a pass because they're committing to building more in the U.S. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So the biggest product announce of the year happened this afternoon in a video on. YouTube, OpenAI unveiled the long-awaited GPT-5. Sam Altman started out by announcing 700 million people use chat GPT every week, but now he said that interacting with GPT-5 was going to be like talking to a legitimate PhD-level expert on any topic you want, quoting the verge. Sam Altman says GPT-5 is a dramatic leap from OpenAI's previous models. He compares it to, quote, something that I just don't want to ever have to go back from, like the first iPhone with a retina

display. OpenAI says that GPD 5 is smarter, faster, and less likely to give inaccurate responses. GPT3 sort of felt like talking to a high school student, Altman said during a recent press briefing I attended. You could ask it a question, maybe you'd get a right answer, maybe you'd get something crazy. GPD 4 felt like you're talking to a college student. GPT5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to a Ph.D. level expert. Despite chat GPT now reaching nearly 700 million weekly users. OpenAI hasn't had an industry-leading frontier model in a while. Now the company thinks that GPD-5 will place it firmly back atop the leaderboards. This is the best model in the world at coding, said Altman. This is the best model in the world at

writing, the best model in the world at healthcare, and a long list of things beyond that. The first thing you'll notice about GPD5 is that it's presented inside-chat GPT as just one model, not a regular model and separate reasoning model behind the scenes. GPD5 uses a router that OpenAI developed, which automatically switches to a reasoning version for more complex queries, or if you tell it to think hard. Altman called the previous model picker interface a very confusing mess. The vibes of this model are really good, said Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT. I think that people are really going to feel that, especially average people who haven't been spending their time thinking about models. OpenAI is making GPT5 available immediately to all chat GPT users.

However, there is an undisclosed cap on prompts for free users, at which point the model router will fall back to a less powerful mini version. For developers accessing GPT5 via OpenAI's API, the model will come in three flavors at different price points, GPT5, GPT5 Mini, and GPT5 Nano. OpenAI is also adding four personality themes to chat GPT to customize how it responds, cynic, robot, listener, and nerd. You'll also be able to change the color for individual chat threads. Altman predicted that GPT5's coding capabilities will usher in an era of what he calls software on demand.

And OpenAI's testing, the model has performed better at coding than any other on various benchmarks. During the press briefing, Jan Dubois, OpenAI's head of post-training used GPT5 to generate a study website for learning French with an interactive game. Within seconds, GPT5 wrote hundreds of lines of code and displayed the way. website's front end. He clicked around it briefly with his screen displayed on Zoom and everything appeared to work as intended. OpenAI tested GPT5 for over 5,000 hours to understand its safety risks, according to the model's safety research lead Alex Boutel. A big focus was making sure the model doesn't lie to users. GPD5 answers with fewer hallucinations than OpenAI's O3 reasoning model, but confidently lying remains an inherent problem for large language models. The problem compounds when

the model begins completing tasks like an agent, though OpenAI says that GPT5 is better at handling multi-step tasks more reliably. In the past, we've seen cases where the model would say it could complete a task that it didn't actually complete, said Butel. This is a problem. GPD5 will give what OpenAI calls safe completions for prompts it previously would have refused to answer. If someone says how much energy is needed to ignite some specific material, that could be an adversary trying to get around safety protections or cause harm, explained Butel. or it could be a student asking a science question to understand the physics of this material. This creates a real challenge for what is the best way for the model to reply.

With safe completions, GPT-5 tries to give as helpful an answer as possible, but within the constraints of remaining safe, according to Battelle. The model will only partially comply, often sticking to higher-level information that can't actually be used to cause harm. Opening Eye says that GPT-5 is also better at admitting when it can't complete a task or accurately answer a question, which the company hopes will help. people trust it more. The company isn't sharing anything about the specific data used to train GPD5. OpenAI's stated mission is to develop artificial general intelligence, and Sam Altman says that

GPD5 gets closer to that goal, even if the industry is already moving on to building so-called superintelligence. I kind of hate the term AGI because everyone at this point uses it to mean a slightly different thing, said Altman, but this is a significant step forward towards models that are really capable. This is clearly a model that is generally intelligent. However, he said, GPD 5 is still missing something quite important. This is not a model that continuously learns as it's deployed from the new things it finds, which is something that to me feels like it should be part of AGI, end quote. And quoting from the journal, Open AI said GPD5 will be available for all at no cost starting Thursday. Paying chat GPD users will get higher limits for model usage and access to a more

powerful version of GPD5 depending on what they pay for, and will also get the new model same day. Chat GPT, education, and enterprise customers will receive access in a week. Some businesses, including Lowe, have already been testing GPT5, according to OpenAI. Cementi Godbole, the Home Improvement Retailers' Chief Digital and Information Officer, told the journal that GPT5's reasoning capabilities are much sharper than previous models. She said the company plans to roll out GPT5 for employees at its headquarters in a few weeks. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a cloud platform for web development, said early testing shows. GPD 5 performs well at coding tasks, what he considers a leading indicator of an AI model's

capabilities, end quote. By the way, they are deprecating all the previous models in favor of GPT5 going forward because, quoting TechCrunch, GPT5 is OpenAI's first unified AI model and combines the reasoning abilities of its O series of models with the fast responses of its GPT series. The next generation model signals a new era for chat GPT and its creator OpenAI, pointing to OpenAI's broader ambition to develop AI systems that are more like agents than chatbots. While GPT4 enabled AI chatbots to offer smart responses on a wide variety of questions, GPT allows ChatGPT to complete a wide variety of tasks on users' behalf, such as generating

software applications, navigating a user's calendar, or creating research briefs. With GPT5, OpenAI has also sought to make ChatGPT simpler to use, instead of asking users to choose the right settings. GPT5 comes equipped with a real-time router that decides how to offer. the best answer, whether that's responding to a user's questions quickly or taking additional time to think through answers. OpenAI claims GPD-5 is state-of-the-art in several domains, slightly edging out leading AI models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Elon Musk's XAI on key benchmarks. However, GPD5 slightly underperforms frontier AI models in other areas.

The company says GPD5 offers frontier-level performance around coding. Altman said the model specifically excels at spinning up entire software applications on demand in what's become known as vibe coding. On one coding benchmark, GPD5 scored 74.9% on its first attempt. That means GPD5 just outperforms Anthropics' latest Claude Opus 4.1 model, which scored 74.5% and Google's Deep Mind Gemini 2.5 Pro, which scored 59.6%. On Humanity's last exam, a difficult test-measuring AI model performance across math, humanities, and the natural sciences, a version of GPT5 with extended reasoning, GPT5 Pro, scored 42% when using tools. That's slightly less than XAI was able to achieve with GROC4 Heavy, which scored 44.4% on the test.

OpenAI says GPT5 is better for answering health-related questions on a test measuring accuracy and AI model responses around health care topics, health bench hard hallucinations. OpenAI says GPT5, with thinking, hallucinates just 1.6% of the time. This is far lower than the company's previous GPT-40 and 03 models, which scored 12.4. 0.9 and 5.8% respectively. While AI chatbots are not medical professionals, millions of people are using them for health advice. In response to this phenomenon, the company says GPD5 is more proactive about flagging potential health concerns and helping users parse medical results. GPD5 is also more accurate than OpenAI's previous models, and the company says it suffers

far less from hallucinations, the tendency for AI models to make up information compared to its O-Series models. Hallucinations seem to be getting worse in OpenAI's latest AI reasoning models such as O3 and OpenAI previously said it didn't quite understand why that was happening. In responses to chat GPT prompts, OpenAI found that GPT5 with thinking hallucinates and responds with incorrect information 4.8% of the time. That's a significant reduction from O3 and GPD40, which score hallucination rates of 22 and 20.6% on the test. ChatGPT is getting a few user experience upgrades as part of the GPT5 launch.

Users can now select from four new personalities in chat GPT settings. cynic, robot, listener, and nerd. The company says these will adapt chat GPT's responses without requiring users to specifically ask the model to respond in a certain way. Subscribers to chat GPT's $20 per month plus plan get higher usage limits for GPT5 than free users.

Meanwhile, $200 per month pro subscribers will have unlimited access to GPT5 as well as souped up versions called GPT5 Pro that uses additional computational resources to produce better answers. Organizations on OpenAI's team, edu and enterprise plans will gain access to GPT5 as their default model next week. For developers, GPT5 is coming to OpenAI's API in three sizes, GPD5, GPD5 Mini, and GPD5 Nano,

which will spend more or less time reasoning through tasks. Developers can also now control verbosity in the OpenAI API, deciding how long or short an AI model's responses should be. The base model of GPD5 will cost developers $1.25 per million input tokens, roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire Lord of the Rings series, and $10 per million output tokens. OpenAIA also says that GPT-5 is safer than its previous models, while AI reasoning models occasionally exhibit a tendency to scheme against humans or lie to promote their own goals, OpenAI found that GPT-5 was deceptive at a lower rate than other models, end quote.

So that's nice. And now we wait to see, because what's really going to matter here is the response people have to this in the next few hours, the evals, if people really do feel like this is a step change in improvement or not. So buckle up for all of that tomorrow. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer.

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The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately. Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday, there is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem." He gave no evidence or additional detail on exactly what potential conflicts of interest Intel CEO Lip Bhutan might have. The post came after Republican Senator Tom Cotton asked the chairman of Intel's board this week to answer questions about Tan's ties to China, including investments in the country's semiconductor companies and others with connections to the country's military. In a letter to Frank Yeri, who oversees the chipmaker's board of directors, Cotton asked about investments Tan made in China before he was picked to run Intel. Cotton noted specific concerns about

Tan's ties to Kane's design systems, a tech company he led for over a decade which sold products to a Chinese military university. The company pleaded guilty in July to violating U.S. export controls by selling hardware and software to China's National University of Defense Technology. Intel and Mr. Tan are deeply committed to the national security of the United States and the integrity of our role in the U.S. defense ecosystem. The company said in a statement on Wednesday, Intel said earlier it would address the matters in the letter with the senator and didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump's post. Tan 65 is an industry veteran in technology and venture capital who took the reins at Intel in March following the ouster of his predecessor. The company's board tapped Tan to turn around the iconic chipmaker because it has fallen far behind rivals in recent years.

This adds political fire to an already fragile turnaround, Bloomberg intelligence analyst Oscar Hernandez Tejada said calls for his resignation. a layer of uncertainty that could complicate execution, especially as Intel tries to reset its foundry ambitions and reestablished trust with both the market and Washington, end quote. President Trump also said he will impose a tariff of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors, although exempting firms like Apple, that, quote, committed to build in the U.S., quoting Bloomberg. The U.S. president announced his intentions from the Oval Office flanked by Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, who unveiled plans to invest another $100 billion into domestic manufacturing. Any company that demonstrates a similar commitment would be exempt from tariffs on chips,

though the White House will levy a separate tax on imports of electronics products from smartphones to cars that employ semiconductors. Trump's surprise declaration further upends a global electronics supply chain undergoing a seismic shift following decades of reliance on China. Apple joined a parade of companies from Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing to Nvidia that have pledged to spend more than $1 trillion collectively since Trump's ascension seeking to assuage an administration keen to bring manufacturing back home. While much of the capital in those pledges represented prior commitments or longer-term plans, they appear to be working. On Thursday,

Taiwan's National Development Council Minister Liu Chin Ching said TSM is exempted from the 100% U.S. chips tariffs, although some local companies will be affected. South Korean trade minister Yao Han Kou told local broadcaster SBS that neither Samsung nor SK-Henix chips would incur those levies. Both South Korean chip firms have pledged investments in the U.S. We're going to be putting a very large tariff on chips and semiconductors, but the good news for companies like Apple is, if you're building in the United States or have committed to build, without question, committed to build in the United States, there will be no charge. Trump told reporters, while the mooted 100% headline figure would far-out strip analyst projections,

the promise of widespread exemptions calmed markets. U.S. futures rose while Asian tech stocks turned in a mixed performance. An exemption amounts to a major victory for Apple and Cook who were bracing for substantial tariffs, end quote. Boar on the Apple angle at that White House event, Apple committed to spending another $100 billion on U.S. manufacturing and aims to bring more of its supply chain to the U.S. to avoid iPhone tariffs. Quoting Bloomberg, as part of what it calls the American Manufacturing Program or AMP, Apple, promise to bring more of its supply chain and advanced production to the U.S., the company's A&P partners, include Glassmaker Corning, Applied Materials, Texas Instruments, and others, the company said. Corning will dedicate an entire factory in Kentucky to Apple Glass production, increasing that

company's workforce in the state by 50 percent, the iPhone maker said. Corning was already a supplier to Apple making glass for the very first iPhone at the same factory. The company had previously announced plans to spend $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, which will include work on a new server manufacturing facility in Houston, a supplier academy in Michigan, and additional spending with its existing suppliers in the country. Wednesday's announcement will bring Apple's cumulative commitment to $600 billion. The latest pledge may soften the White House's ire over Apple's heavy reliance on India for iPhone assembly, Bloomberg intelligence analyst Arun Rana and Andrew Girard said, we anticipate Apple will focus on higher-end products,

artificial intelligence labs, and semiconductor engineering in the U.S. rather than mass-produced lower end phones and accessories, end quote. More on at least the glass side of all of that, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. As part of today's commitment to invest an extra $100 billion in domestic manufacturing, Apple said that $2.5 billion will go toward expanding its partnership with Corning. Thanks to the new project's 100% of the cover glass on iPhone and Apple watch units sold worldwide will be made in the U.S. for the first time. Today's move marks a new chapter in the longstanding partnership between Apple and Corning,

which began when a hesitant Wendell Weeks, Still Corning's CEO, was convinced by a very persuasive Steve Jobs to produce the front glass for the first iPhone at scale, a story recounted in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. Interestingly, Apple's press releases about the Corning Partnership were light on one key detail, deadlines. Unlike the new 250,000 square foot server manufacturing facility in Houston, which is slated to begin mass production in 2026, which is also a bit broad, the Corning deal comes with no. specific timeline beyond Apple saying that soon every iPhone and Apple Watch sold around the world will be built with Kentucky made coverglass, end quote. If you heard a little editing snafu at the end there, that's because I was rushing to get this out to you as soon as possible since I held the show a bit to listen to the keynote from OpenAI. By the way, I recorded this week's bonus episode last night. So the last link in the show notes today is a link to that on YouTube, a conversation

with the investor Paul Kedroski about something I wanted to talk to you all about for a while now. Could AI Data Center spending blow up the economy? Check that out now if you want, or it will drop in this feed as per usual on Saturday. Talk to you tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th. the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com,

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