Theo is an interesting guy who's found himself as a bit of an AI YouTuber over the last year (used to talk about JavaScript stuff), and he was invited by OpenAI to test GPT-5 ahead of its announcement last week. Long story short:

  1. He loved it
  2. Many people hated it
  3. People called him a shill

The video above is not one of his best videos, but it's basically an apology video that isn't really an apology because the GTP-5 that's out now is not the same as the GPT-5 he got to use in early testing. I call it not one of his best because it seems his takeaway is that being genuine is not worth it because he got so much shit for this – that is not the lesson!

One lesson here is that one should never never never never make extremely confident statements about the quality of a new LLM in the first few days of using it. We all know the cycle at this point where whatever the latest new flagship model gets hyped up for a few days as "THE NEW CLEAR LEADER" and then after that people find the faults and limitations, and things settle down a bit. This happened with Grok 4 a few weeks ago and now Grok is generally considered 💩 (unless you're Elon-pilled). It happens with every Gemini release. Now it's happening with GPT-5. You can talk about these models right away and you can be excited about them, but be mindful that your thoughts will likely change.

Another lesson is that despite him saying it didn't have an impact, it really seems like being there with OpenAI and being involved in the launch had an impact on his impressions. I'm sure he genuinely thinks it didn't but if you liked the model and you got to be part of early access and you got to be part of their marketing material, it's going to amplify those feelings. It happens when people go to WWDC and Google I/O as well, and while I think professional reporters have a better knack for setting the excitement aside, influencers just don't do a great job of this. I'll include myself in that group, and I don't even go to big events like this. I was 100% more excited during my Comfort Zone podcast recorded with Chris and Federico in a special room at the conference than I would have been if we were all just on a normal Riverside call like we do every week.

So absolutely be genuine, this is exactly what people want from the people they follow. Get excited about what gets you excited! Be annoyed when something isn't as good as you wish it was! But be careful saying anything definitive about a product after using it for one day, and be 10x as careful when saying that about an LLM.

For what it's worth, I think GPT-5 is pretty good and I appreciate the less personal tone that it has. It's better at coding that GPT-4o in my experience, and an do quite well using tools in apps like Cursor, but Claude 4 Sonnet remains my go-to model for all things code.