OpenAI launches GPT-5 to all ChatGPT users

PLUS: Google's new AI can understand animal sounds

AuthorAuthor

Rowan Cheung & Shubham Sharma
August 08, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI’s long-awaited GPT-5 is finally here, ushering in a new era of advanced intelligence for the world.

While top-tier performance was something many of us expected from GPT-5, the real surprise turned out to be accessibility — with OpenAI making the flagship system available to all its 700M users, including those on the free tier.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI releases long-awaited GPT-5 models

  • Google open-sources AI to understand animal sounds

  • Automate business workflows with Perplexity Comet

  • MIT’s AI predicts protein location in any cell

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI has finally launched its flagship GPT-5 models, replacing GPT‑4o, 4.1, 4.5, o3, o4-mini, and marking a new age of intelligence that is smarter, faster, and accessible to everyone.

The details:

  • The model family includes three variants—GPT-5, GPT-5 Pro, and GPT-5 Mini—with GPT-5 coming to free users under usage limits (higher limits for Plus and unlimited for Pro users).

  • GPT-5 switches thinking on/off using a real-time router (based on the task) and delivers SOTA performance on coding, writing, math, and health benchmarks.

  • Its Pro version, coming to Pro users on $200/month plan, thinks longer with scaled parallel test-time compute to provide the most comprehensive answers.

  • The smaller GPT-5 Mini, meanwhile, comes into play only when free and Plus users hit rate limits, ensuring the rest of their queries are handled.

  • OpenAI also says these models hallucinate less, are less deceptive, and communicate with honesty when they can or can not handle a task.'

Why it matters: OpenAI’s move to replace its flurry of models with a unified GPT-5 simplifies user experience and gives everyone a PhD-level assistant, bringing elite problem-solving to the masses. The only question now is how long it can hold its edge in this fast-moving AI race, with Anthropic, Google, and Chinese giants all catching up.

Share your use cases: We’d love to hear how you’re using ChatGPT 5. Let us know for a chance to be featured in next week’s newsletter to 1M+ readers.

TOGETHER WITH TRIPLE WHALE

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  • Catch wasted ad spend and performance dips before they hurt your bottom line

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  • Write high-converting emails with insights into what messaging actually works and why

AI FOR GOOD

Image source: Google DeepMind

The Rundown: Google DeepMind just open-sourced an upgraded version of Perch, an AI model that helps scientists analyze massive amounts of wildlife audio, making it easier to track endangered species in diverse environments.

The details:

  • Perch can now handle a wider range of species and environments, from forests to coral reefs, using twice the training data of the version released in 2023.

  • It can disentangle complex soundscapes over thousands or millions of hours of audio, answering questions from species counts to newborn detections.

  • The model also comes with open-source tools that combine vector search with active learning, enabling the detection of species with scarce training data.

  • With this system, conservationists don’t have to scour through massive volumes of bioacoustic data when planning measures to protect ecosystems.

Why it matters: From finding elusive bird populations in Australia to accelerating honeycreeper monitoring in Hawaii by 50x, open-source access to the upgraded Perch marks a breakthrough in wildlife conservation. AI's speed and precision can give scientists an edge to save species well before they disappear.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Perplexity’s new Comet Shortcuts feature to create automated workflows that can be triggered anywhere in the browser with a simple command.

Step-by-step:

  1. Head over to your Perplexity Comet browser (if you’re a member of The Rundown University, you get early access perks)

  2. Type / anywhere in Comet and select “+ Create a shortcut.”

  3. Enter the prompt: “Analyze this product and search for real, unbiased assessment. Give me non-sponsored testimonials and potential downsides,” and add the name vendor-review

  4. Test with /vendor-review on any vendor website

Pro tip: Use this shortcut to fact-check product reviews for bots in real-time before spending money.

PRESENTED BY WARP

The Rundown: Warp is the top-performing AI coding agent in benchmarks, trusted by over 600K active developers. Warp’s new Lightspeed plan offers the most generous monthly limits of any AI plan on the market, with access to the best AI models across providers.

Why Lightspeed:

  • Access the best models like Opus, Sonnet, and GPT 4.1, all in one subscription

  • 50K AI requests included monthly

  • Seamless pay-as-you-go when you exceed limits

Try Warp for free – and get 20% off your 1st month with code THERUNDOWN.

AI RESEARCH

Image source: MIT

The Rundown: Researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the Broad Institute have developed PUPS, an AI system that predicts the exact location of virtually any protein within a single human cell, marking a major shift in disease diagnosis and treatment.

The details:

  • PUPS uses a protein language model to capture the structure of a protein, and an inpainting model to understand the type, features, and stress state of a cell.

  • Using insights from both models, it generates a highlighted cell image showing the predicted protein location at the cell level.

  • It can even work on unseen proteins and cell types, flagging changes caused by mutations not included in the Human Protein Atlas.

  • In tests, PUPS consistently outperformed baseline AI methods, showing lower prediction error across all tested proteins and maintaining accuracy.

Why it matters: Until now, pinpointing a protein’s location in a specific cell meant long lab work was limited to known proteins. PUPS removes those barriers by mapping any protein in any cell type, accelerating disease research, drug discovery, and enabling exploration of previously uncharted cellular biology.

QUICK HITS

  • 🧠 ChatGPT - OpenAI AI assistant, now enhanced with flagship GPT-5 models

  • 🔍️ NuMarkdown - An 8B parameter, open-source reasoning model for OCR

  • 📽️ Midjourney - Now with an HD mode for 4x more pixels in video generations

  • 🤖 North - Cohere’s secure and customizable AI agent platform

  • 🧑‍💻 The Rundown - Product Marketing

  • 💰 Grammarly - Compensation Systems Analyst

  • 📊 Databricks - Strategy & Execution Manager

  • 🤖 Meta - Director, Robotics Operations

OpenAI added GPT-5 models in the API and introduced four new personalities to ChatGPT, along with a more advanced voice mode and chat customizations.

xAI plans to add ads in Grok’s responses, with Elon Musk saying, “If a user’s trying to solve a problem, then advertising the specific solution would be ideal,” he said.

Elon Musk also said on X that xAI will open-source its Grok 2 AI model next week, following OpenAI’s move to launch its first open models after GPT-2 in 2019.

The Browser Company launched a $20/month subscription for its AI browser Dia, providing unlimited access to chat and skills features and taking on Perplexity’s Comet.

Microsoft added GPT-5 to its Copilot AI assistant with a new smart mode that automatically switches to the flagship model based on the task at hand.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Truth Social launched Truth Search AI, a Perplexity-powered AI search feature that delivers information from select sources.

MiniMax dropped Speech 2.5, its new voice cloning AI that supports 40 languages and can mimic voice while preserving elements like accent, age, and emotion.

COMMUNITY

Join our next workshop today at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll know how to run your own fully private, open-weight ChatGPT alternative locally on your computer.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

That's it for today!

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer—the humans behind The Rundown

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