Breaking: GPT5 Is Out

The furious battle for AI’s summit

My mission with The Leverage is to explain what matters in tech markets—in a way that is beautiful, rigorous, and entertaining. When I launched, I wasn’t sure this was a real business. This week erased my doubt. AI launches came from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, yet few clear data points emerged to give readers true, ahem, leverage. Moments like this are why this publication exists.

The big item is the release of GPT5 today. The performance, the scope and scale of its capabilities are #1 in the world in nearly every category.

However, what is perhaps most interesting is the margin and manner of its victory. It does not dominate the benchmarks. It is not the same leap that GPT3 to GPT4 was. Instead, there was a focus on speed, costs, "aesthetic judgement” (a phrase so loaded that at least 14 Kantian philosophers imploded at the thought of AI having it), and integrations to Gmail. This was not a roaring increase in intelligence, but a significant upgrade in ChatGPT. I am very excited as a user! But I would be concerned as an investor.

The strategic implications of this release are perhaps more important than its actual capabilities. It shows that every foundation model company has no choice but to fight in the same market: code.

We are in the midst of a platform shift, an alteration in how we interact with our computers. As a reader of mine you know this. What we haven’t known is where the final battleground of this technology will be. What matters? Who profits? GPT5 is the best, clearest answer we have to all those questions.

Let’s talk about it.