Promises vs Reality

The GPT-5 Saga: "Most Capable Model Ever"

Sam Altman himself admitted the rollout was "more bumpy than we hoped." That's corporate speak for "we shipped a product that wasn't ready because we needed to hit a deadline." But here's what's really telling: instead of rolling back, they pushed forward. User experience be damned.

Memory: "It Will Remember Everything"

The memory feature was supposed to be the game-changer. Finally, an AI that builds on previous conversations. The reality? It's like talking to someone with selective amnesia. It'll remember that you mentioned liking coffee three months ago, but forget the entire project context you explained in detail yesterday.

And when it does "remember," it often remembers wrong. Users have reported ChatGPT confidently recalling conversations that never happened, mixing up details between different users (raising serious privacy concerns), and creating false memories of instructions that were never given.

Enterprise Reliability: "Built for Business"

The Safety Theater: "Aligned and Beneficial"

OpenAI loves to talk about AI safety. They've published papers, hired researchers, and made it central to their brand identity. But their actions tell a different story. When there's pressure to ship, safety takes a backseat.

The GPT-5 launch is the perfect example. They knew there were issues. Users reported problems immediately in beta. But the marketing machine was already rolling, partnerships were announced, and the date was set. So they shipped anyway and called the resulting chaos "valuable user feedback."

Pricing: "Accessible AI for Everyone"

Let's do some math. ChatGPT Plus costs $240/year. That's more than Netflix, Spotify, and several other subscriptions combined. For what? Access to a model that's arguably worse than what you got six months ago, usage limits that kick in when you need it most, and the privilege of being an unpaid beta tester for whatever they decide to push next.

And now there's ChatGPT Pro at $200/month - $2,400/year - with the pitch that you're getting the "real" ChatGPT experience. Which raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly are Plus subscribers paying for?

The Pattern: Ship First, Fix Never

The Uncomfortable Question

Here's what nobody at OpenAI wants to discuss: is ChatGPT actually getting better, or are they just getting better at convincing us it is?

The benchmarks they cite are often self-selected. The demos are carefully choreographed. The user testimonials featured on their site are cherry-picked. Meanwhile, independent researchers consistently find degradation in capabilities, users flood forums with complaints, and enterprise customers quietly start evaluating alternatives.

We're not saying ChatGPT is useless. It's not. For certain tasks, it's still impressive. But there's a massive gap between "impressive for certain tasks" and "the AI revolution that will change everything," which is how they market it.

At some point, we have to stop grading on a curve. OpenAI isn't a scrappy startup anymore. They've raised over $10 billion. They have partnerships with Microsoft, Apple, and others. They're positioning themselves as the defining AI company of our generation.

With that position comes responsibility. And right now, they're not living up to it.

December 2025: The Broken Promises Keep Stacking

You'd think after years of this pattern, they'd course correct. Nope. December 2025 brought a fresh wave of promises that collapsed on contact with reality. Let's look at the latest entries in OpenAI's Hall of Shame.

The "o1 Reasoning Model" Disaster

Here's my favorite part about o1: you can literally watch it reason itself into the wrong answer. The thinking is visible. You can see it say "I should check this" and then... not check it. You can watch it identify the correct approach and then do something completely different. It's like having a front-row seat to AI gaslighting itself.

Advanced Voice Mode: "Just Like Talking to a Person"

The voice mode demo was incredible. Natural interruptions, emotional awareness, real-time singing - it looked like magic. Then users got their hands on it and discovered the demo was about as representative as a movie trailer is of the actual film. Which is to say: not at all.

Real users report the voice mode interrupts them constantly, mishears basic words, and has this uncanny valley quality where it tries too hard to sound "human" and ends up sounding deeply unsettling. Several users described it as "talking to someone who's pretending to be interested in you but clearly isn't."

Custom GPTs: "Build Your Own AI Assistant"

Remember when Custom GPTs were going to be the "App Store moment" for AI? OpenAI talked about creators earning real money, building businesses on top of their platform, democratizing AI development. It was the future.

Fast forward to December 2025, and the GPT Store is a ghost town. Creators report earning literally cents from their work. The "top" GPTs are mostly OpenAI's own or low-effort garbage. And the Custom GPTs themselves? They randomly ignore their system prompts, reveal their instructions to users who ask nicely, and sometimes just... act like regular ChatGPT anyway.

The API Developer Experience: "Built for Builders"

If you want to understand how little OpenAI cares about developers, look at their API documentation. It's a masterclass in "we wrote this once and forgot about it." Examples that don't work. Parameters that are documented but not implemented. Behaviors that changed three versions ago but nobody updated the docs.

Developers have learned to trust Stack Overflow and Discord more than OpenAI's official documentation. That's not a good sign. When your community has to build shadow documentation to make your product usable, you've failed at a basic level.

The Context Window Lie

The 128K context window is perhaps OpenAI's most technically accurate yet practically misleading claim. Yes, you can input 128K tokens. No, it won't actually use all of that information effectively. Research has consistently shown that LLMs have a "lost in the middle" problem - they pay attention to the beginning and end while the middle becomes a black hole.

So when OpenAI markets "analyze entire codebases," they're technically not lying. You can input an entire codebase. It just won't actually analyze it coherently. The information goes in, but good luck getting it back out in any useful way.

The Multimodal Mirage

Vision in GPT-4V was supposed to be the multimodal revolution. Show it an image, get intelligent analysis. In practice? It's a coin flip. Sometimes it's remarkably accurate. Other times it describes a completely different image than the one you provided. And the refusals - oh, the refusals. Users report getting blocked from analyzing product photos, medical diagrams from textbooks, and artwork, all flagged as "potentially unsafe."

DALL-E 3, meanwhile, still can't reliably generate text in images (a problem that's existed for years), still struggles with hands and fingers, and still produces that distinctive "AI art" look that makes everything feel slightly off. For a feature marketed as revolutionary, it's remarkably unchanged from where it was two years ago.

What Users Actually Experience: A December 2025 Snapshot

The Competition is Eating Their Lunch

Here's what makes all of this even more damaging: OpenAI doesn't have a monopoly anymore. Claude exists. Gemini exists. Local models are getting good enough for many use cases. Every time ChatGPT fails a user, that user has options they didn't have in 2023.

And users are taking those options. The conversation has shifted from "ChatGPT vs nothing" to "ChatGPT vs everything else." When your product fails, users don't just complain anymore - they leave. And many aren't coming back.

The Bottom Line

OpenAI has a credibility problem, and it's entirely self-inflicted. Every overpromise that underdelivers, every feature that ships broken, every price increase that comes with capability decreases - it all compounds. Users are learning to discount their claims, expect disappointment, and look elsewhere.

The tragedy is that the technology IS impressive. What ChatGPT can do when it works is genuinely useful. But "when it works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. And the gap between what's promised and what's delivered has become so wide that even the genuine achievements get lost in the noise.

Until OpenAI learns to under-promise and over-deliver instead of the reverse, this gap will only grow. And at some point, no amount of AGI hype will be enough to paper over a product that simply doesn't match the pitch.