Athena Update: What GPT-5 Means for You

Hi team,

This morning, August 7th 2025, OpenAI launched GPT-5.

State of AI Search

The last large update to ChatGPT was GPT-4o over a year ago in May 2024 when OpenAI had 200M monthly active users. Today, this number has more than quadrupled to 800M+ monthly active users.

Combined across ChatGPT's 800M, Gemini's 350M, and AI Overview's 1B+ users, estimated 1B+ users worldwide are now using AI Search as a primary mode of search.

What makes GPT-5 different?

1) GPT‑5 will be the new default in ChatGPT, replacing GPT‑4o, OpenAI o3, OpenAI o4-mini, GPT‑4.1, and GPT‑4.5 for signed-in users. Source: OpenAI

2) OpenAI has made it available for ALL users, not just paying users. This will impact all 700 million+ ChatGPT users around the world

3) Stronger multi-step reasoning performance on across the board on tasks, especially related to economic and health-related. We anticipate this will only increase consumer reliance on ChatGPT and similar GenAI engines for key decisions.

Side note: Already, 60% of all searches are powered by GenAI (~50% of Google searches now trigger AI Overviews

More to come soon from Athena.

Andrew + Alan