GPT-5 at Scale: Why Reliability Slipped

Physical products get more dependable as they scale. Intelligence systems don’t — and GPT-5’s launch shows how routing failures, hardware variance, and load at scale can make a model seem dumber

A new model can be very good and also (apparently) very bad. At once.

This is a quick note as we sort through the implications of the some of the teething issues with the ChatGPT-5 rollout.

None of this shifts my overall perspective in my review yesterday, but I think the rollout issues call out something unique with intelligence models that is worth st…