ChatGPT users are mass cancelling OpenAI subscriptions after GPT-5 launch: Here’s why
OpenAI’s much-hyped GPT-5 model was unveiled during a live-streaming event by the company on Thursday. The new model comes with claimed improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, accuracy, writing, and multi-modal abilities compared to the older models, while also having a lower hallucination rate (tendency to make stuff up). Despite all these improvements, longtime ChatGPT users were not happy with the upgrade provided by the AI startup, as the company also went on to discontinue older models like GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1-mini, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o3, and o3-pro.
ChatGPT users stormed social media platforms to show their dissatisfaction with the latest move by OpenAI. Users noted how GPT-5 lacked the personality shown by GPT-4o, while giving shorter and less contextually accurate replies that lacked the “warmth” and “emotional intelligence” of the previous models.
Users on the ChatGPT subreddit have been voicing their opinions against the new model while praising the previous ones, especially GPT-4o, which was the default standard model on ChatGPT. The backlash against OpenAI has gone to such an extent that users are now threatening to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions and delete their accounts until OpenAI decides to bring back the older models.
How angry Redditors are reacting to GPT-5
“I just lost access to 4o, and I know I’m not the only one. For me, this model wasn’t just ‘better performance’ or ‘nicer replies.’ It had a voice, a rhythm, and a spark I haven’t been able to find in any other model,” wrote one user in a Reddit thread.
“What kind of corporation deletes a workflow of 8 models overnight, with no prior warning to their paid users? Personally, 4o was used for creativity & emergent ideas, o3 was used for pure logic, o3-Pro for deep research, 4.5 for writing, and so on,” stated another user.
Many others noted that they used ChatGPT running GPT-4o more as a companion of sorts, with whom they shared their life problems and sought advice — something they said is not possible with GPT-5 due to its changed personality.
Meanwhile, another Reddit user claimed that they had cancelled their ChatGPT subscription due to what they termed ‘dishonesty’ during the GPT-5 presentation, where the company had fallen into controversy for showing performance charts that later turned out to be inaccurate.
“I also did so (cancelled ChatGPT subscription) last night, less over the model update (or lack thereof), and more over the sheer dishonesty in the presentation (benchmark-cheating, deceptive bar charts),” the user added.
Many ChatGPT Plus users also complained about the low chat limits placed on them. OpenAI allowed Plus users to send 80 messages every 3 hours with GPT-5, and up to 200 messages per week with the GPT-5 Thinking model.
OpenAI responds to backlash around GPT-5
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the backlash during a Reddit AMA session along with a separate post on X, where he confirmed that the company was doubling the rate limit for ChatGPT Plus (standard model) while also allowing them to use GPT-4o for a little longer.
“GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often,” Altman noted in his post.
“We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query. We will change the UI to make it easier to manually trigger thinking,” he added.
