It was meant to be a triumph, another confident step onto the sunlit uplands of progress. On August 7, 2025, OpenAI introduced GPT-5, the newest version of its popular large language model, and the occasion had all the requisite ceremony of a major technological unveiling. Here was a system with “Ph.D.-level” skills, an intelligence tuned for greater reliability, and a less cloying, more businesslike tone. The future, it seemed, had been upgraded.

The problem was that a significant number of people preferred the past.

The rollout, rather than inspiring awe, triggered a peculiar form of grief. On the forums where the devout and the curious congregate, the reaction was not one of celebration but of loss. “Killing 4o isn’t innovation, it’s erasure,” one user wrote , capturing a sentiment

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