GPT-5 Launches First in Microsoft 365 Copilot — Are You Ready?

And just like that, OpenAI has caught up with Microsoft and got its own new model in ChatGPT!

Did you want to do some side-by-side comparisons? Unless you want to fire up the API, hard luck as a cluttered set of options in ChatGPT has now been distilled to GPT-5, GPT-5 Thinking, and GPT-5 Pro (for the $200/mo AI class). I'll be sticking to doing comparisons in Copilot.

Is it good?

In Copilot I've been very impressed with GPT-5 so far. The depth of inquiry into topics and the number of sources considered significantly exceeds what we are used to. However, we are still a long way from a context of everything, and some things still get missed because of the vagaries of search.

Another key factor has been the willingness to work on finding a solution. I went back and forth with GPT-5 powered Copilot this morning for a while working out an approach for it to find the duration of a series of meetings as they actually occurred rather than as scheduled (Spoiler: This is considerably harder than you might imagine). It also gave me some interesting insights in how it would propose getting past some of Copilot's limitations, like the fact that custom metadata or content types do not appear to Copilot in searches of SharePoint content.

Will I be making a video looking at GPT-5? Yes.

Is it becoming continuously harder to dream up "real life" demos of these tools that don't require half my time to be spent improvising a fake job in a non-production tenant? Also, yes.

Anyone with thoughts on that problem, please chime in.

However, my biggest takeaway from this release and the talk from OpenAI of our new team of PhDs, is that few of us need a PhD-level team to be successful in our work. The challenge with these tools is increasingly less about how smart they are, but rather about how smart we are in using them, in adopting them, and in forming a habit where they are beneficial to our output.