GPT-5 arrives, and the model picker disappears
OpenAI released GPT-5 yesterday and routed everything through it automatically. The automatic routing is the part that affects how you budget.
OpenAI released GPT-5 on 7 August 2025, describing it as its most capable model, with improvements in coding, writing and multi-step tasks. Alongside it, the interface changed: instead of choosing a model, the product decides which to use for each request.
The capability claims will be tested over the coming weeks by people with better benchmarks than this blog. The routing change is immediately relevant and has had almost no coverage.
Why automatic routing matters to a buyer
In April this blog recommended sorting your tasks into three tiers — small, medium and reasoning — and asking your vendor whether you could set the tier per task or whether the product decided for you.
This is the second answer, shipped to millions of people at once. The product decides.
For an individual that is straightforwardly better: nobody should have to know which model suits a question. For a company with a usage-based bill, it is a visibility problem. If the system decides when to spend twenty times more computation on an answer, your monthly cost depends on a routing decision you do not see and cannot audit.
The question to ask this month
Of whichever provider you use: can I see, per month, how my usage split between tiers?
This was the closing question of the 19 March post on hardware pricing, and it has become considerably more pressing now that routing is automatic and invisible by default.
If the answer is no, treat your AI line as less predictable than it was, and set a cap if your provider offers one.
The wider trend across the year
February: a model that chooses how long to think. June: prices cut eighty per cent. August: a product that chooses the model. Each step moves a decision from you to the system.
Each is genuinely an improvement in usability, and each removes a piece of visibility. That trade is usually worth it. It is worth it more when you have asked for the reporting that puts the visibility back, and that reporting is something vendors build when customers ask.