Openai Ai Agents Are Broken Is Gpt 5 Really The Answer

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 27, 2025, 8:02 PM

openai ai agents are broken is gpt 5 really the answer

As 2025 dawned, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was promoting two developments he insisted would transform our lives. One, of course, was GPT-5 — a long-anticipated major upgrade to the Large Language Model (LLM) that powered ChatGPT's rise to tech world superstardom. The other? AI Agents that don't just answer your queries like ChatGPT, but actually get stuff done for you. "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents join the workforce and materially change the output of companies," Altman wrote back in January. Well, we're eight months in, and Altman's prediction already needs a big old asterisk.

Sure, companies are keen to adopt AI Agents, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT agent. In a May 2025 report, consultancy giant PWC found that half of all firms surveyed planned to implement some kind of AI Agent by the end of the year. Some 88% of executives want to increase their teams' AI budgets because of Agentic AI. But what about the actual AI Agent experience? With apologies to all those hopeful executives, the reviews are almost uniformly negative. If "AI Agents" was a new high-tech James Bond movie, here's the kind of blurbs you'd see on Rotten Tomatoes: "glitchy ...

inconsistent" (Wired); "came off like a clueless internet newbie" (Fast Company); "reality doesn't live up to the hype" (Fortune); "not matching up to the buzzwords" (Bloomberg), "the new vaporware ... overpromising is worse than ever" (Forbes). OpenAI faces backlash as users complain about broken workflows and losing AI friends. It’s been less than a week since the launch of OpenAI’s new GPT-5 AI model, and the rollout hasn’t been a smooth one. So far, the release sparked one of the most intense user revolts in ChatGPT’s history, forcing CEO Sam Altman to make an unusual public apology and reverse key decisions. At the heart of the controversy has been OpenAI’s decision to automatically remove access to all previous AI models in ChatGPT (approximately nine, depending on how you count them) when GPT-5 rolled out to...

Unlike API users who receive advance notice of model deprecations, consumer ChatGPT users had no warning that their preferred models would disappear overnight, noted independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a blog post. The problems started immediately after GPT-5’s August 7 debut. A Reddit thread titled “GPT-5 is horrible” quickly amassed over 2,000 comments filled with users expressing frustration over the new release. By August 8, social media platforms were flooded with complaints about performance issues, personality changes, and the forced removal of older models. Marketing professionals, researchers, and developers all shared examples of broken workflows on social media. “I’ve spent months building a system to work around OpenAI’s ridiculous limitations in prompts and memory issues,” wrote one Reddit user in the r/OpenAI subreddit.

“And in less than 24 hours, they’ve made it useless.” OpenAI is a California-based artificial intelligence research company that develops and deploys AI applications including the generative AI bot ChatGPT. OpenAI's much-anticipated GPT-5 release is under fire for underperformance and operational inefficiencies. Critics, including developers, emphasize GPT-5's struggle with complex reasoning and coding, slow response times, and excessive token usage. OpenAI's newly implemented 'model router' is also sparking frustration due to its unpredictability and lack of transparency. The AI community is abuzz with skepticism as the company tries to navigate through user dissatisfaction and restore trust.

As 2025 dawned, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was promoting two developments he insisted would transform our lives. One, of course, was GPT-5 — a long-anticipated major upgrade to the Large Language Model (LLM) that powered ChatGPT’s rise to tech world superstardom. The other? AI Agents that don’t just answer your queries like ChatGPT, but actually get stuff done for you. “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents join the workforce and materially change the output of companies,” Altman wrote back in January. Well, we’re eight months in, and Altman’s prediction already needs a big old asterisk.

Sure, companies are keen to adopt AI Agents, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent. In a May 2025 report, consultancy giant PWC found that half of all firms surveyed planned to implement some kind of AI Agent by the end of the year. Some 88% of executives want to increase their teams’ AI budgets because of Agentic AI. But what about the actual AI Agent experience? With apologies to all those hopeful executives, the reviews are almost uniformly negative. If “AI Agents” was a new high-tech James Bond movie, here’s the kind of blurbs you’d see on Rotten Tomatoes: “glitchy … inconsistent” (Wired); “came off like a clueless internet newbie” (Fast Company); “reality...

OpenAI’s next leap in artificial intelligence isn’t about bigger promises, it’s about fixing what didn’t work. The GPT-5 model will be a steady step forward, focused on improving performance in code generation, math, and AI agent reasoning. Unlike the massive shift from GPT-3 to GPT-4, this upgrade builds from painful lessons learned over the past year. In early 2024, OpenAI poured energy into training a new large language model called Orion. It was meant to replace GPT-4. But Orion stumbled.

It didn’t scale well, cost too much, and didn’t outperform GPT-4 by any meaningful margin. This forced OpenAI to rethink how it builds, trains, and refines future AI systems. What came out of that pivot is now being shaped into GPT-5. Orion was meant to be a game-changer. Early testing showed small improvements, but those didn’t scale. OpenAI’s engineers struggled with three major issues: the lack of fresh training data, unstable reinforcement learning outcomes, and weak general performance when scaled up.

These problems came to a head when the Orion model produced results too close to GPT-4, despite rising infrastructure and training costs. In response, OpenAI quietly rebranded Orion as GPT-4.5, buying time to adjust its approach instead of launching a lackluster GPT-5. To rebuild momentum, OpenAI introduced a universal verifier, an internal model that evaluates every output during reinforcement learning. Instead of relying on raw RLHF signals, this verifier scores outputs and ensures that only high-quality answers are reused in training. Automate Your Life and Yahoo may earn commission from links in this story. Pricing and availability are subject to change.

OpenAI’s much-anticipated GPT-5 launch was supposed to be the moment the company cemented its lead in artificial intelligence. Instead, it turned into a scramble. Within days, CEO Sam Altman was walking back decisions and restoring older models. For a product used by hundreds of millions each week, the misstep wasn’t just a technical issue; it was a crack in OpenAI’s image as the inevitable winner of the AI race. And it raised a bigger question. If GPT-5 isn’t the leap forward people expected, where does OpenAI go from here?

The story of GPT-5 isn’t just about a flawed launch; it’s about shifting user trust, rising competitors, and what the future of AI leadership might really look like. Imagine you could replace a team of specialized agents with a single model. That’s the promise of GPT-5. GPT-5 arrived with a bold promise: a single model that unifies the strengths of all previous generations — multimodality, reasoning, strict instruction-following, and function calling. But for Applied Engineers, the key question is:Does GPT-5 mark the end of specialized multi-model agentic workflows, or is it just another step in their evolution? To find out, I put GPT-5 to the test in AI-Agent-Casebook – my open-source project designed to evaluate frameworks, patterns, and models on realistic, complex agentic use cases.

Among them: video_script, a fully-fledged agentic workflow combining a Hierarchical Team, Planner/Evaluator, and Corrective RAG. Could GPT-5 live up to its promise in this demanding context? Here’s what I discovered.

Openai Ai Agents Are Broken Is Gpt 5 Really The Answer

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“And In Less Than 24 Hours, They’ve Made It Useless.”