What GPT-5 means for the way we work and live in 2025

This morning, I asked GPT-5 for a beginner yoga routine.

It gave me a beautifully sequenced flow and then suggested ending with a meditative headstand to fully center your energy. Despite having the core strength of a baguette, I found myself genuinely believing I could pull it off.

That’s the thing about GPT-5: It’s encouraging, inventive, and at times, blissfully unaware of your true limits. Its uncanny knack for anticipation somehow makes it feel almost human. For a moment, I found myself saying yes to every follow-up prompt because it seemed to know exactly what I needed next, and it was even better than previous models.

Turns out it’s not just me: Even my mom, who shares my ChatGPT account, says yes but with a “please” added to it, just in case the polite humans get remembered when the machines take over.

And now it’s not just in your search bar. It’s in your inbox, your calendar, your code editor, and maybe even planning your meal preps and date nights. As Sam Altman said during the launch of GPT-5, “[This model] is like having PhD-level researchers on your phone.”

But here’s the catch: GPT-5’s arrival isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s landing in the middle of a messy macro moment: tariffs and job cuts, a global AI gold rush, billions sunk into data centers, and millions more into—somehow—Labubu figurines (more on this later).

We’re still arguing whether these tools are making us sharper or quietly outsourcing our brains, and we haven’t even fully processed the last model cycle yet. Even Sam Altman agrees that his kid will never be smarter than AI.

A unified AI experience

According to OpenAI, GPT-5 is its most capable and smartest model yet.

And it does feel different right off the bat. For starters, it doesn’t try to sound like a sycophantic yes man, telling us how we can never do any wrong and that we are very beautiful inside and out.

Under the hood, OpenAI has scrapped the confusing model buffet (4o, o3, and o3-mini) and replaced it with one unified system that routes your request to either:

• GPT-5, the flagship model: The quick thinker.

• GPT-5-Thinking: The deep thinker.

• GPT-Pro: The premium option with higher caps if you can stomach and/or justify the $200/month bill.

In English: You were driving a stick; now it’s an automatic gearbox—quick when you need speed and careful when things get convoluted.

 Real-world improvements 

On paper, the upgrades land where people feel them. Reception ranges from deep anxiety of being replaced to grateful that information is becoming accessible to those without prior knowledge. Where it shines? See below:

• A coding behemoth: GPT-5 posts 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified (real GitHub issues), edging out prior OpenAI reasoning models while using fewer tool calls. Translation: It’s better at fixing the annoying bugs that ruin your afternoon. Better at doing your whole job? Not quite yet.

• Giving your doctor a run for their money: It’s explicitly tuned to be a more careful thought partner on health questions and scores much higher than earlier models on HealthBench, OpenAI’s physician-built evaluation. (It’s still not a doctor; you still need your real one.)

• No more* wild made up stories: Independent roundups report GPT-5 as being more reliable, with meaningfully lower distortions and more honesty about limits, especially when the deeper reasoning kicks in.

• Real-life hooks: You can now connect Gmail and Google Calendar so ChatGPT can help plan your day, surface emails that need replies, and juggle schedules without the copy-paste Olympics.

Why this is bigger than anticipated: Did we achieve AGI?

The productivity gains are real. GPT-5 can draft your reports, debug your code, summarize a 200-page document, and suggest three better ways to spend your afternoon all before lunch. And yes, it often anticipates what you’ll want next. (Is that where all of our “private” conversations were used? Don’t answer that.)

So, is this artificial general intelligence (AGI)? Short answer: No. Longer answer: GPT-5 is less of a final boss of intelligence and more of a matured, less confusing model of ChatGPT. It has simpler choices, better defaults, and sturdier guardrails. That simplification is likely providing the biggest real-world gains.

However, it doesn’t come with absolute consistency. GPT-5 is actually a collection of models behind the scenes. Some are brilliant, and some are average. And since queries are smartly routed, you don’t know which one you will get, so results might vary. There’s a reason behind this too, and it comes down to money.

A recent NVIDIA paper suggests the future won’t be a single, giant LLM for every task but a coordinated system of specialist models. GPT-5’s architecture is in line with this prediction: a fast, efficient model (the flagship version of GPT-5) for most jobs and an expensive model (GPT-5-Thinking) for the mental heavy lifting.

Humans already work this way. Our superpower isn’t that every person is great at everything, it’s that we specialize and share. This blueprint of mimicking the way human intelligence works might bring AI closer to AGI than any other approach.

Use it or lose it: Brain edition  

So, let’s circle back to Labubus, because they’re more than a random collectible here—they’re a reminder that when the world tilts too fast, people reach for little anchors. Whether it’s AI quietly rewriting the rules of work or an economy quietly rewriting the rules of survival, we fall back on old instincts to cope. GPT-5 didn’t launch into a calm, rational world; it landed in the middle of layoffs, tariff wars, AI arms races, and a global recession that somehow coexisted with record sales of Stanley cups and Labubu figurines. It’s a kind of collective, cognitive whiplash: We’re watching billions of dollars being poured into AI development while everyday life feels uncertain. Economists call it revenge spending. Psychologists call it coping. Either way, it’s the same instinct that kept lipstick sales high in the Great Depression: We need small luxuries to remind ourselves we’re still here.

And that’s the tension we’re living in: an AI boom colliding with human routine. We’re learning to work alongside a tool that can outthink us in seconds while still clinging to the small rituals that make life feel ours.

LLMs are on track to keep getting better. However, between the code they write and the headstands they suggest, there’s a space where you can choose how much of your thinking to outsource and how much to keep as your own. Maybe, just maybe, try to resist the urge to have these AI tools plan everything for you. There’s value in doing some of the messy thinking yourself.

GPT-5 is a leap forward in what AI can do for your daily workflow. It’s faster, more accurate, and more integrated into the tools you already use. But it’s also part of a much bigger economic gamble. It’s raising questions about skills, energy, and who this technology ultimately serves.

So use it. Enjoy it. Test its limits. Just remember: It’s a tool, not an oracle. And the best work you’ll do with GPT-5 is still the work you steer.

Written by: Samudhra Sendhil - Enterprise Evangelist at ManageEngine