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Claire Vo
GPT5 is the newest model released from OpenAI and from my very first interaction I felt like this was a engineer built by engineers for engineers. It writes good code, it refactors, it's thoughtful and girlfriend loves to call a tool. If you have a good idea and you really just need to get down to what are the technical implementation of this feature, I think GPT5 is tremendously better at that than GP4 which again like actually pretty light on functional requirements. If your use case is getting things to humans like business users or stakeholders, you might like a GPT4103 output a little bit more business oriented. Really no complaints. It's exceptional at coding. This is a highly technical model. I think it's going to be a daily driver for lots of folks. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI Obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I'm doing something a little bit different. I'm walking you through the newly released GPT5 model from OpenAI and giving you my honest takes on a couple workflows that I personally use. We're going to look at GPT5 for product managers and engineers, investigate some stylistic choices that the model has made and also go through a couple personal workflows that I find useful and see if side by side GPT5 outperforms other models. Let's get to it. To celebrate 25,000 YouTube followers on how I AI, we're doing a giveaway. You can win a free year to my favorite AI products including V0 Replit, Lovable, Bolt, Cursor and of course chat PRD by leaving a rating and review on your favorite podcast app and subscribing to YouTube. To enter, simply go to howiaipod.com giveaway Read the rules and leave us a review and subscribe. Enter by the end of August and we will announce our winners in September. Thanks for listening. So before we get into how this model performs, let's talk about what the model is. GPT5 is the newest model released from OpenAI and they were generous enough to give me a little bit of early access to play with the model and really start to understand its strengths and weaknesses. And from my very first interaction with GPT5, I felt like this was a engineer built by engineers for engineers. This is a highly technical model both in capabilities and style and this is going to be one that you're really going to reach for on a daily basis. If you are coding, testing the technical bounds of these LLMs or solving deeply complex problems, but it might have some pieces for the business thinkers out there or the product owners out there that might not work for your use case. And we're going to show exactly what I mean by that in just a second. Now, I have been pretty familiar with the OpenAI ecosystem for quite some time and have been using the OpenAI models almost exclusively for my own product chat PRD. That being said, I do work with a variety of models and model providers in my day to day workflows. So when I'm coding using Cursor I'm often using Claude 4 Cloudsonnet 4 Gemini 2.503 from OpenAI in chat purity I again are using a lot of the OpenAI models 4,041Even did a little test with 45 when that first came out and I use a variety of different out of the box AI tools as well. So I'm using ChatGPT relatively often, occasionally go into quad, have my whole stable of different AI coding tools which again choose and fine tune their own models. So I do feel like I'm pretty familiar with the model ecosystem, at least the commercial model ecosystem, and have really developed a sense of where these models perform well for specific use cases and where they don't. And I'm the kind of user and AI power user that really selects the model for the use case. So I was really excited to get access to GPT5 because I wanted to know the answer to the question which is where does this model fit on my team? I don't think of myself as a single model employer. I really think of models as part of a team and tools as part of a team and each model has their own personality and capabilities, each tool has its own personality and capabilities. And I think that rather than think is this an upgrade, I think is this an addition to my team and where would I put them into play? So the first thing that I did when I got access to GPT5 is I went straight to the use case that I know, love and think about the most, which is actually, actually Chat PRD and our core chat and document generation implementation. It's a common use case for product managers using AI to generate product requirements documents. It's a place where I've spent a lot of time prompt testing, model testing and really optimizing the experience for both matching the stylistic tone I want for the product as well as getting great user feedback on outputs. And we've really a b tested this pretty significantly into depth in Chat Purity and landed Most recently on GPT4.1 and a variety of tools and prompts being the best stack for our users. And in July we had a 96% satisfaction rate with our documents. So that's how I'm really thinking about it. I'm thinking what model is highest performance cost really doesn't come into play, but it will later and then do do users love it? And I consider myself a proxy for the product manager and engineering user. So I feel like I have a pretty good sense of sense of what will perform well in this use case and won't. So when I got access to GPT5, what I did is I went ahead and used LaunchDarkly AI configs, which lets me on demand switch the model that I'm using in local or production. And I started testing GPT5 and what I'm going to show you on my screen right now is really a side by side representation of the results. So GPT4.1, our core model that we use on chat PRD is on the left and GPT5 is on the right. And a couple things right out the gate that I noticed and in fact I had to prompt around is GPT5 when I first tested spoke like a developer. This is actually tuned a little bit for prompt on the right side. It just wanted to write me markdown bullet point lists and I gave that feedback to the OpenAI team, did a little bit of prompt engineering and I think it's a little bit more natural language when you speak to it, but you're definitely going to see GPT5 she loves a bullet point list. So we're going to get lots of bullets and we're going to call lots of tools. That's what something you're definitely going to see in this episode. But if you look at it side by side to start off, they are pretty similar responses and I think that's really a representation of they share the same system prompt in context in chat purity. So this is the exact same system prompt, exact same context. It's coming back and it's just really asking me questions about what I want to achieve with my product when I ask it to brainstorm new features. Now where you start to see it diverge is what it starts to focus on when asking to brainstorm new features. And so if you look at GPT4.1's response here, the questions are really about business impact. You get a lot of discovery around what metric you want to change, who is your Persona, what what is your business goal? And I've noticed that throughout my side by side evaluation. This is just one example GPT4.1. And some of the older models just came at the problem from a more general but more business oriented lens. But GPT5 on the right really came to features quickly. And I think this is an important point for product managers to note because you know us product managers, we love to ask a good why and we really love to understand the problem. And what you see in GPT5 is a jumping to the solution. And I think that's a reflection of the way it was trained and the place that GPT5 fits in the sort of ecosystem of OpenAI models. It's very clear that that the coding model wars are heating up, that the IDE wars are heating up, that the coding tool wars are heating up. And this model really feels like an answer for engineering use cases more than anything. And what I thought was interesting is we'll get to those engineering use cases. I think it's quite exceptional at writing code, but that sort of angle into execution of engineering tasks even bleeds into the conversational aspect of, of the model. And so you can even see the point of view of the model, if you can call it that, is really different from 4.1 which we're using on the left, which really comes from a business point of view. You'll see very quickly GPT5 is getting to an execution engineering point of view. So it's just something to consider as you look at these models side by side, what you're really going to get out of them and where they might be most applicable in your use case. And so right off the gate we're seeing 4.1 be more business oriented, 5.0 be a little bit more technically oriented. And then I ask it to focus on free to paid conversion. And again, we get pretty similar ideas. So again, this isn't the most radical product area to focus on. It's well trodden, well documented. You know, both of these models probably have access to best in class growth tactics. So you'll see the kind of features be very similar across the two. But if you really inspect, you will see that the description of the features for four. One on the left are much more user centric and much more business centric. So it's really like a who why question. If you look at GPT5 again, I find this so fascinating. It's really a what how answer. And I think that really sums up how I would say my interactions with this model has been. You still get a little bit more of that like business User discovery from, you know, 4:1 or 4:003. Even GPT 5 is like, tell me what to build, tell me exactly how the features work, give me numbers, give me user stories, give me something to code. And so I just thought it was really interesting to see that the ideas themselves, again pretty similar, but the way those ideas are executed are very different. And you'll start to see the chats branch here and you'll start to see the GPT5 chat really branch into wanting to get into technical code, which has its pros and cons. And you'll really see the GPT4 1 model really stay in this business, kind of like high level mindset. And so as an app builder focused on product managers, what am I thinking to myself? I'm thinking, well, my product's a product manager, it needs to talk to engineers, but it's a product manager. And so I'm unsure if my users are going to love GPT5 because it skips that step of product management thinking and gets right to what to build, which again, engineering side of my brain loves. So I'm going to pull these docs up side by side and really show you what the PRD that got generated from each of these models look like. And again, pretty similar prompts, pretty similar inputs, you can see right out the gate. I mean, I told you, it's an engineer for engineers. It tried to put this code block comment at the top of the document. Again, just a pure signal. This is, you know, trained to write technical documents and trained to write code even when you tell it to write like a prose document, like a prd. You see artifacts like this which are code based, which I find very, very, very interesting. And so if I'm looking at these, these PRDs side by side, a couple things that you're going to notice. GPT5 writes more, it is a, it is significantly more detailed in its content and I think there are pros and cons to that. I think when you're trying to define something for a engineer or a coding agent to execute, the more detailed you can get, the better. When you are trying to align stakeholders as product managers or other business users might need to do, sometimes a level of detail too far can actually obscure the primary message that you're trying to get across. And so I'm looking at these side by side and I'm really thinking, do I want five business goals for this product? Are these the right business goals and are they artificially too Precise on the GPT5 or are they like perfectly precise and so it was just something that I observed in looking at these side by side. Now if we scroll down, really interesting. Again, the Personas are a lot more detailed, there are more of them and the use cases are very specific. But on the GPT5 model, the use cases are very feature centric. And on the GPT4 model they're very like what I'm trying to achieve as a user specific. And so I thought it was really interesting to just kind of compare and contrast both of these. Again, GPT5, very detailed. Where I love GPT5 and prefer it over the 4, one model is the functional requirements are exceptional. The formatting got a little weird, but you can see here there's a prioritized list in a table. There's lots of details about soft warnings, hard warnings. I mean, these are the kinds of things that the best engineers are going to ask you about how this stuff works. And so if you have a good idea and you really just need to get down to what are the technical implementation of this feature, I think GPT5 is tremendously better at that than GP4, which again is like actually pretty light on functionality requirements. I think you could say the same for user experience. Again, you're just going to get a lot more detail out of GPT5 in terms of describing the user experience in prose. And so if you are using any of the prototyping models, like a V0, a lovable, a bolt, a magic patterns, whatever those might be, the more specific you can be about describing the user experience in pros, the happier you're going to be with your prototype. And I think four. One is actually pretty high level and five is, is, is pretty exceptional at that. Now the narrative is an interesting, interesting one. You know, GPT5's a little longer, I will say, like it's not a terrible writer. So I don't think that its prose is necessarily cold or not compelling or not lyrical, which are things. As somebody who has a liberal arts degree, I really care about. It's just a little bit more detailed. And I think, you know, writing shorter prose is also a virtue. And so you really need to think about do you need as many words is simpler, better? Are the details really valuable here versus in another version now again, another place where I think GPT5 obviously outperforms 4:1 in a side by side is technical consideration. So if you are an engineer and you need to write a tech spec, I would highly recommend GPT5 over any of the other models that I tested. It is just very specific. It speaks in the language that an engineer would understand. It's really detailed in its analysis of requirements. And so I do think it is a really nice technical writer and I think engineering teams, docs teams are going to be quite happy with it. I honestly think product managers might not need to be writing this part of a prd. So maybe there's a division of labor here that happens naturally or in your AI tools. But again, GPT5 is really going to outperform on technical considerations and detail across the board. So that's a side by side. But these PRDs don't operate in a vacuum. They are artifacts generated for another purpose. And so what I wanted to do is actually generate a prototype based on those different purities. So if we go back to my general analysis, I thought that GPT 4.1 business oriented, higher level, maybe easier to read as a reader because it's not so dense, not as technical, not as detailed. GPT5 Engineer, Engineer, Engineer, very detailed, perhaps overly so. But the real question is do I get a better prototype? One shot out of those prompts versus another. And this is where I think things get interesting. And because I would say to you, if your use case is getting things to humans, you might not want to and those humans are not engineers. Engineers, I love you, you're humans. But I'm going to put you in a different category for just the sake of this argument. If you are trying to get this to business users or other stakeholders in your company, you might like a GPT 404103 output a little bit more business oriented, a little slight, slightly more condensed, easier to read, not so much excessive detail. If you're trying to get this to an engineer, you're I think you're going to be happier with a GPT5. And so what's interesting about the side by side is honestly for a prototype and visual style, I like what 4.1 prompting did into this is our v0 integration. I like what 4.1 prompted into v0 and the outcome here it's colorful, it's clear, I understand you know what's happening here. I think this looks nice. Meta observation. I could not get V0 via GPT5 to generate color. It's like all very gray and blue but you can see on the left side with 4.1For whatever reason, whatever prompt was behind the scene, which I'll have to go look at, we got a little bit more color and a little bit more design. It's much simpler, it looks nice, it's visually appealing, but I feel like GPT5 over here on the right gave me and I'm just gonna make it a little bigger so you can see gave me a lot more to work with. And what I mean is I tend to think of these prototypes as inspiration for implementation, not implementation itself. So I'm never like gonna ship this. This is not what chap heredity looks like. It's not what our product looks like. I'm. But I'm really looking for ideas on upsells and free to paid. And I just think the fact that they put so much detail into the purity means they put so much into the prototype, which means I have a lot of components to choose from when I really want to make my product better. And so I have locked spaces, I have upgrade widgets, I have free trial details, I have, I'll try it later, I have upgrade now. But I mean I just have. There is just as much in here as I want to pick. And when you're looking at prototypes as an ideation space, honestly I think taking a abundance mindset and generating as much as possible and be like, I'll never use that. Oh, I like this is a lot better. And so I think the verbosity of GPT5 in terms of technical specifications and user experience actually output more interesting ideas when given to a prototyping tool. So that was a really interesting observation for me. I wasn't sure that I would love it and I actually didn't love it on first pass, but once I started to click through I was like, man, it really thought of a lot here and I think that's because it was given quite a bit of detail. So that's just one little side by side on prototype generation. I want to give you one last observation in the specific chat purity use case which I found quite interesting, which is I gave it a copy of our homepage and I asked it to change things. And this is what I find interesting. As much as I thought that GPT5 was a pretty cold, straightforward, detailed engineer, GPT4 was much 4.1 was much meaner to me. It was much more critical and I thought that was kind of interesting. GPT4 1 starts out and this makes me feel bad about my homepage which just says not up to standard, very straightforward. GPT5 was like that's pretty good areas to improve. And what's interesting about the instructability and promptability of the model is I actually went back and gave it another pass and said could you be a little bit more critical of my homepage? Same prompt. And again GPT4 1 was legitimately, legitimately critical, cruelly critical if you look at it. And GPT5 really again started with like the shit sandwich, excuse, pardon my French, but it really started with here's what's not working, or here's what's working, here's what's not working. But like you can make it better. And, and I think this is interesting. One of the things that you really have to test as an application builder is working with LLMs is can you tune it via prompts effectively? Now again, these two side by sides are using the exact same prompts. I have not prompted to the strengths and or weaknesses of GPT5. I've just simply been giving it similar side by side content, context and prompting and it was just really interesting to see how you can massage the LLM responses to meet your needs. So my general conclusion remains the same through the side by side, which is functionally this thing is built to code and this thing is built to help you code and you're going to be very happy with the strengths of that. But it might have some drawbacks on the other side, especially as an application developer, a business user, and then we'll get to it. I actually think it's got some strengths from the consumer perspective. Today's episode is brought to you by Chat prd. I know that many of you are tuning in to how IAI AI to learn practical ways you can apply AI and make it easier to build. That's exactly why I built ChatPRD. ChatPRD is an AI copilot that helps you write great product docs, automate tedious coordination work and get strategic coaching from an expert AI cpo. And it's led by everyone from the fastest growing AI startups to large enterprises with hundreds of PMs. Whether you're trying to vibe, code a prototype, teach a first time PM the ropes, or scale efficiently in a large organization, Chat PRD helps you do better, work fast and we're integrated with the tools you love, v0.dev, Google Drive, Slack, linear Confluence and more so you don't have to change your workflow to accelerate with AI. Try ChatPRD free at ChatPRD AI Howiai and let's make product fun again. So let's go really quickly into coding and then I'll zip back around to a couple personal use cases and we will get you to using GPT5. So let's talk about coding for just a little bit and before I get to that, I do have to give OpenAI true and unsponsored props here. I think that the OpenAI team continues to outperform on API design capabilities and developer support. One of the reasons that for chat purity honestly that I have centralized on a lot of the OpenAI models is that it's not the models themselves are exceptional compared to ones by Anthropic or other providers. It's really not that it is quite simply the API designs developer tools, ecosystems and essential primitives that get exposed under, you know, on top of these models are just much easier to work with. As a software engineer developing LLM backed tools, I've been very happy with many of the upgrades not just to the GPT5 model, but with the GPT5 model. Some increased improvements in tool calling, reasoning, all these sort of parameters and controls that you have over the model that as an application developer make me very happy. So I'm not going to go into that too deeply. If anybody wants to talk about it, I'll chat with you all day about it. But I think the API improvements here are worth taking a look at and you should check out the documentation now using Open or using GPT5 to code I'm going to just show you two things. One my favorite right now and I am a model switcher the nothing stresses me out more than someone selecting auto in cursor like auto model select. I cannot, I cannot imagine it really stresses me out like you just leave it to the forces that be to choose your model. No, no no no. You have to be very opinionated with your model and so I historically using cursor just as an example I'm really prescriptive with what model I choose and you can say this is all made up stuff. I use Sonnet 4 a lot for front end work. I think it does pretty good front end work. I use 2503 quite a bit in the past for deeper technical work. Been pretty happy with it. I do think 2.5 is clinically depressed. It's always so sad in its thinking. So Google friends out there please just cheer it up a little bit. I don't mean my mean prompts and then I have recently been testing GPT5 here for a couple couple weeks and it's been really interesting because I got access to GPT5 when I was shipping a very major feature. I mean thousands and thousands of lines and I will tell you one the performance of the model it's very fast. So I've been very happy with the performance of the model. It's allowed me to do a lot Very quickly. Two, it's, I mean it's good, it writes good code, it refactors, it's thoughtful and let's take that word thoughtful and talk about one of my primary observations on this model girlfriend loves to call a tool. So if you, if you look over here on the right man, I have rarely hit cursors 25 tool call limit in a single call in many, many moons. I have not hit that in a long time and I hit it really consistently with GPD5. It will take advantage of tools. It is a tool calling beast. And so you can see here on the left side, it's reading, it's searching, it's reading, it's searching, it's reading, it's searching. Honestly, sometimes it felt a little inefficient and ineffective and this will be one of my questions as these get rolled out into production in these coding tools, will token usage, will tool calling and performance start to become an issue? But man, she loves a tool call. The second thing you'll see here is it loves bullet points. It will talk to you in bullet points all day and all night. It loves, loves, loves bullet points. And so you'll see it talk to you like an engineer might talk to you in slack. Lots of bullet points. But that being said, the code I am happy with. The quality I'm happy with. It's a great engineering partner. As I said, you want one of these on your team. So we didn't go too deep into coding. But again, GPT5 is now my daily driver. I love it and it's really great when you're actually using the code in production. So again, I'm going to repeat myself. I really do think this is a great engineer's model and you're going to really like it for that use case. But let's switch over and look at Chat GPT and how GPT5 actually operates in their core product. Okay. So the one thing you'll know is you'll have two options here. At least I had two options here. GPT5 and GPT5 thinking I'm used thinking for specifically prototyping and design in ChatGPT. So I think that with GPT5 thinking it is possible that ChatGPT really becomes a viable option for folks trying to do some high level prototyping inside an AI tool. I love the specialty tools. I love V0 lovable bolt, all those. Of course I work in cursor, but if you're really just trying to design something, One of the things I noticed about GPT5 is it's got great front end design taste and actually makes things that look pretty good. So I'm going to go ahead and turn on Canvas, which allows ChatGPT to generate some images. And I'm going to drop in a copy of the Chat Purity homepage so you can see it's very pink. We love her. And I'm actually going to write just a really simple prompt here. I'm going to say design and prototype a blog for Chat Purity matching our style. Okay, that's it. So GPT5 is going to use that reference image. It's going to think. It loves to think. We can actually expand this thinking right now and see how it thinks through generating this. It's got good front end design guidelines and then it's going to actually generate the code here in line in Canvas. And I've done this a couple times with GPT5 in ChatGPT. And the thing that I've been most impressed with is it's classy. She's classy. And I think a lot of the prototyping tools sometimes have a pretty standard, boring and repetitive style for their AI generated front end. And I would just say that GPT5, in my anecdotal experience, has had a little bit more polish, a little bit more high quality design sense than some of those other offerings right out the box. Now they all have their strengths. I'm certainly going to keep them in my rotation. But it was a nice observation as they in particular on front end and user experience design, this was particularly nice. So let's take a look at it and see if I actually got that right. And what do we have? Let's just allow. Okay. Allow access. You know, it's not terrible. I think we're struggling with a couple issues here. Actually raised this to the OpenAI team. Struggles a little bit with background and text, color contrast. It could be an issue with the code and css, it could be an issue with the model. It really replicated my gradient that I like to use. Didn't quite do the logo, but I didn't expect it to, but kind of got to a good sense of what my header looks like and then again came in here and generated for what I think is just a generally nice component here. And then this I really like. I think this looks quite lovely for a blog post. Again, not pixel perfect, but I think a little bit nicer than you might see and out of the box previously with some of the other models from OpenAI and in Canvas. So I've been relatively happy with with that and think that, you know, for somebody looking to do some front end prototyping it can be pretty nice. But again we've got to solve this text on background issue so OpenAI team get to get to that fix quickly. Now a couple other things I want to show you before we wrap up the episode is just a personal use case where I actually did another side by side of GPT5 and GPT4 and I really saw GPT5 shine. So you all may have your ESALs and benchmarks that you're evaluating the technical and mathematical strengths of your models against. And I have my own benchmark that I am testing all models against and that benchmark is can it reasonably help with my bathroom remodel? Yes, you heard it here. Can it reasonably help with my bathroom remodel? Now I've been doing a lot of things with GPT4 on my bathroom remodel, including experimenting with whether or not different layouts will be up to code, what I could possibly do, generating screenshots of what my bathroom might look like. It's all very thrilling and I've actually been okay happy with what 4o has done for me. So if you want to see what kind of high quality AI powered work I'm doing with chat GPT right now I'm really trying to explain to my contractor exactly how I want my new bathroom laid out. And so I have been prompting 4O with these prompts like I need a bathtub with fixtures at one end, a tile, a level tile ledge at the other with 8 inches and 4 inch tile shelves on the wall. Picture generate is very good prompting here and halfway through this chat I really switched to GPT5 and I will tell you I can show you exactly where I did right around here I was switching to GPT5 and I was very happy with the actual outcome and layout that the image generation did in this instance I've actually struggled a lot with image gener room layouts. I think that interior design is such a fun use case of AI and I have actually had a really challenging time getting AI to interpret my prompting correctly. Where things are on the left wall versus the right wall versus the back wall, up, down, left, right, what's inside the room, what's outside the room. And I will say I think that GPT5 did a quite lovely job of it. Had to ask it for a couple do overs but if you are curious this is a little bit of my new tiny San Francisco bathroom might look like, but I took it a little bit Further. And I took it further and also did a side by side comparison of 4.0 versus GPT5. And if we all remember, we love 4.0's image generation capabilities. When this first came out, everybody was thrilled with the performance of the 4.0 ImageGen model. It could write text. It was really instructable. The image generations were beautiful. It was very, very fun, very memeable, super exciting. And I will say my experience with the GPT5+ image generation has been exceptional. And it's actually gotten better at all those things we know and love in 4.0. So text generation good. And one of the things that I really noticed about GPT5 is it has a much better size spatial awareness in both code. So when you're instructing it to lay out things as well as an image generation. So it was something that really came across to me as spatial awareness. And you'll see that in this side by side, I'm about to show you. So again, Claire's benchmark for bathroom renovations. We will come up with some sort of really effective acronym for that and we will publish it in an academic paper. But this is what I'm working on right now. I picked out a couple tile samples at the tile store. Very exciting stuff. And I took my ugly iPhone photos and uploaded them here. And I said, what? Benjamin Moore paints? Cause I like a Benjamin Moore paint. Will this green tile wall match? And can you help me with this? Now, this is actually a pretty hard task. I wasn't sure how the model had indexed the sense of color. Honestly, this is a new use case for me. And what was so fascinating is I not only got colors that matched each of the tiles, I got specific names of those colors. The text is very crisp, very clear, and spelled correctly. And even the paint codes for those paint samples. Was not expecting this at all. I was, in fact, not expecting an image at all. I was expecting them to just give me a couple like green colored paint samples. And instead they actually mapped it out here. And I just asked it what it would recommend. It gave me some options. And then it said, do you want to do a full mockup? And I said, yep, do a full mockup with High Park. And I was really blown away by this. And you'll even see the sense of it side by side when I show you what 4o generated. So instead of giving me a kind of plain mock up, it really followed the instructions of where these tile samples are gonna go and where the paint was gonna go and gave me sort of a 3D rendering that I could look at. And this is the version I love the most. Which is it actually followed my instructions. It said half wall of tile, black on the floor, marble on the walls, high park. And it gave me this beautiful layout of exactly what my walls and floors and stuff would look like. I was really impressed with this. Now I asked it to paint the wall. It did an okay job. It didn't know what wall I was talking about. But again, this gave me a really good sense of what my bathroom remodel was going to look like. And now I'm going to go to the Benjamin Moore paint store and ask them to pull High Park. 467 actually I should check. It has been consistently 467 throughout. Oh yeah, throughout. So it seems like consistent reference for the paint number. I thought this was really interesting and I just want to go to a side by side of what GPT4 generated with the same prompt. So I'm going to show you that quickly and then we will wrap up. So if you look on the left, I did the Same prompt into GPT4 and you can see just the mockup that it did was a little less sensical, honestly, and didn't actually match what my description was of the uses of these tiles and paints. And so again, I gave you this as a use case that I think is pretty practical applicable to other use cases a common consumer might think about. How do I design my room? How do I pick an outfit, how do I lay out my backyard, you know, how do I organize my books? And I really do think GPT5 sense of space plus improved image generation options might be a reason that consumers reach for it. It's just yet to be seen how they train the in chat model to have a little bit less of that developer bent and a little bit more friendly consumer orientation. So to sum everything up with a high level takeaway about GPT5 for engineers by engineers. As an engineer, this is a technical thinker, a technical writer, an exceptional coder, you know, for a product person. It may give you more features, how and what as opposed to who and why. So you'll have to really think about what kind of asset you're generating or why you might use this model in production or in your day to day workflows and make sure that it's just the appropriate tool for the job from coding. Really, no complaints. It's exceptional at coding. I've been very happy with it. I've shipped tons of stuff using this model. I think it's exceptional. My only complaints is, you know, try something other than a bullet point and maybe call like one fewer tool if you don't really need it. So we'll see how ultimately the coding tools optimize around the strengths and weaknesses of this model, but I think it's going to be a daily driver for lots of folks, depending on cost and access. And then the final thing, I think ChatGPT is going to get a major upgrade in specific areas, especially canvas front end design as well as image generation, good sense of spatial awareness, and let's just make sure it has a cute personality to go with all those technical chops. So that is my summary of GPT5. This is our first Deep Dive episode of How I AI. Please let us know in the comments if you like and want more content like this. I'm happy happy to walk through my favorite models, my favorite tools, and my favorite creators in more detail. Thanks and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show@howiaipod.com See you next time.
Podcast Summary: An Exclusive Inside Look at GPT-5
How I AI with Claire Vo
Release Date: August 7, 2025
In the August 7, 2025 episode of How I AI, host Claire Vo delves deep into the newly released GPT-5 model from OpenAI. Known for her expertise as a product leader and AI enthusiast, Claire offers an in-depth analysis of GPT-5, comparing it with its predecessor, GPT-4.1, and exploring its applications for product managers, engineers, and everyday users. This episode is particularly insightful for those looking to leverage AI tools to enhance their work efficiency and quality.
Claire begins by introducing GPT-5, highlighting its design tailored for engineers:
Claire Vo [00:00]: "GPT5 is the newest model released from OpenAI and from my very first interaction I felt like this was an engineer built by engineers for engineers."
She emphasizes GPT-5's exceptional coding capabilities, refactoring skills, and technical depth, positioning it as a daily driver for technical professionals. However, Claire notes that GPT-5 may not cater as effectively to business-oriented users compared to GPT-4.1.
Claire conducts a side-by-side comparison of PRD generation using GPT-4.1 and GPT-5:
GPT-4.1 focuses on business impact, user personas, and business goals, providing a high-level, user-centric approach.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "GPT4.1's response... are much more user-centric and much more business-centric. It's really like a who why question."
GPT-5 leans towards technical implementation, offering detailed functional requirements and feature-centric use cases.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "GPT5 is tremendously better at [technical implementation]... it's exceptional at coding."
Claire observed that while both models provide similar ideas, GPT-5's execution is more technical, making it ideal for engineering tasks but potentially less suitable for aligning with non-technical stakeholders.
When generating prototypes, Claire finds:
GPT-4.1 produces visually appealing and colorful designs, suitable for stakeholder presentations.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "With GPT4.1... we got a little bit more color and design... it's visually appealing."
GPT-5 generates more detailed prototypes with numerous components, offering a wealth of ideas for implementation inspiration.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "GPT5... put so much detail into the purity means they put so much into the prototype... lot of components to choose from."
While GPT-4.1 offers simplicity and clarity, GPT-5 provides extensive detail, beneficial for in-depth engineering projects but potentially overwhelming for high-level planning.
Claire tested both models by asking them to critique her homepage:
GPT-4.1 delivered a straightforward and critical response.
Claire Vo [Audio Excerpt]: "GPT4.1 starts out and this makes me feel bad about my homepage which just says not up to standard, very straightforward."
GPT-5 offered a more balanced critique, starting with positives before suggesting improvements.
Claire Vo [Audio Excerpt]: "GPT5 was like that's pretty good areas to improve."
Upon further prompting, GPT-4.1 remained harshly critical, whereas GPT-5 provided constructive feedback, showcasing its ability to moderate its responses based on user instructions.
Claire highlights GPT-5's superior performance in coding tasks:
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "GPT5 writes good code, it refactors, it's thoughtful... it's a tool calling beast."
Key observations include:
Efficiency: GPT-5 frequently utilizes tool calls, enhancing its functionality but potentially impacting performance due to increased token usage.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "It will take advantage of tools. It is a tool calling beast."
Output Style: The model favors bullet points, reminiscent of engineer communications on platforms like Slack.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "You have to be very opinionated with your model... It loves bullet points."
Claire concludes that GPT-5 is an exceptional coding partner, making it a valuable asset for engineering teams, though its technical focus may not align with business-oriented applications.
Exploring GPT-5's capabilities in design, Claire demonstrates its enhanced image generation and spatial awareness:
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "GPT5 has a much better sense of spatial awareness in both code and image generation."
Using GPT-5 within ChatGPT's Canvas feature, she requests a blog design prototype:
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "Design and prototype a blog for Chat Purity matching our style."
The resulting prototype showcased refined design elements with improved aesthetics compared to GPT-4. However, minor issues like text and background color contrast were noted, which Claire has reported to the OpenAI team for refinement.
To illustrate GPT-5's practical applications, Claire shares her experience using both GPT-4 and GPT-5 for her bathroom remodel:
With GPT-4: Generated basic layouts and designs, though lacking precise spatial awareness.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "GPT4 generated... a kind of plain mock up... didn't match my description."
With GPT-5: Offered detailed, accurate 3D renderings that adhered closely to her specifications, including color matching and spatial arrangements.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "GPT5 did a quite lovely job of it... followed my instructions... gave me this beautiful layout."
Additionally, GPT-5 provided specific paint recommendations with correct color codes, enhancing the decision-making process for her remodel:
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "It gave me specific names of those colors... the text is very crisp, very clear, and spelled correctly."
This comparison underscores GPT-5's advancements in spatial reasoning and precise image generation, making it a valuable tool for both technical and creative projects.
Claire wraps up the episode with key insights on GPT-5's strengths and areas for improvement:
Strengths:
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "As an engineer, this is a technical thinker, a technical writer, an exceptional coder...”
Areas for Improvement:
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "My only complaints is, you know, try something other than a bullet point and maybe call like one fewer tool if you don't really need it."
Claire concludes that GPT-5 is poised to become a daily driver for technical professionals while suggesting that further refinements could make it more versatile across diverse use cases.
Giveaway Announcement: To celebrate 25,000 YouTube followers, Claire announces a giveaway where listeners can win a free year of her favorite AI products by leaving a rating and review on their preferred podcast app and subscribing to YouTube.
Acknowledgment of OpenAI: Claire praises OpenAI for their API design, developer support, and continuous improvements in model capabilities.
Claire Vo [Transcript Segment]: "One of the reasons that for chat purity honestly that I have centralized on a lot of the OpenAI models is that it's not the models themselves are exceptional compared to ones by Anthropic or other providers. It's really not that it is quite simply the API designs developer tools, ecosystems and essential primitives that get exposed..."
This episode provides a comprehensive examination of GPT-5, showcasing its enhanced technical prowess and practical applications. Claire Vo effectively balances technical analysis with relatable use cases, making this episode a valuable resource for anyone interested in harnessing the power of the latest AI advancements.
For those eager to explore GPT-5's capabilities further, Claire encourages engaging with the How I AI community through comments and subscribing to the podcast for more in-depth discussions on favorite models, tools, and creators.
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For more information and to participate in the giveaway, visit howiaipod.com.