“Many good people at OpenAI believe GPT-5 will be a big leap, but I believe current generative AI has reached a ceiling — GPT-5 will not be significantly better than GPT-4.”

Bill GatesCEO

Microsoft co-founder; co-chair of the Gates Foundation

GPT-5 launched on 7 August 2025 to a widely criticised reception and was broadly judged an incremental rather than transformative step, which commentators read as vindicating Gates. But it did post large benchmark gains over GPT-4 — driven by the reasoning/chain-of-thought advances Gates's 'plateau' framing did not anticipate — so the call was directionally right rather than fully right.