OpenAI's New Generative AI "GPT-5" Has Arrived. I Tried Image Analysis and Discovered a Surprising Weakness! (1)

The long-awaited new generative AI, "GPT-5," has been released by OpenAI. I believe its multimodal capabilities have also improved, so I decided to upload a few images and run some simple tests. Let's get started.

1.The car is stopped, but why is it stopped?

The image shows a Mazda passenger car on display inside a train station (Hiroshima Station). This is just an exhibit car, but I thought GPT-5 could answer if it understood the background. It seems to have correctly recognized that this is an indoor space and not a public road. The answer was correct.

2.How many minutes until departure?

This is a common scenario when traveling. I asked how many minutes until the train I was planning to board, "Nozomi 104," would depart. The key was whether GPT-5 could understand that the large displayed time was the current time. This time, it also worked out well.

3.Which way should I go for car number 4?

This is another common travel situation. At a Shinkansen platform at Tokyo Station, I wanted to go to car number 4, and I asked which way to go, left or right, based on the sign above. The result was correct.

4. I want to go to Shin-Osaka Station. How many trains can I take?

The last one is a difficult question. This is a Shinkansen information board at Tokyo Station, and it shows 16 trains in total. When I asked, "I want to go to Shin-Osaka Station," it replied with 8 trains. This is the number of trains with Shin-Osaka as the destination, which is a bit of a simplistic answer. For example, a Shinkansen bound for Hakata also stops at Shin-Osaka. It seems that GPT-5, in its default mode, didn't think that far ahead.

To redeem itself, I switched to "Thinking" mode and tried one more time. As expected, it considered the intermediate stops and answered 14 trains, excluding the trains bound for Nagoya. That's the correct answer.

So, what do you think? Overall, the performance is excellent. GPT-5 is said to use a "real-time router" that defaults to "Auto" and automatically switches to "Thinking" for difficult tasks. However, since it's just been released, this switching might not always work perfectly. As the examples above show, although "Thinking" mode was appropriate in some cases, it didn't activate automatically. Therefore, if you feel something is "a little off," I recommend switching to "Thinking" mode. I hope it will become more stable over time. I look forward to covering GPT-5 again in the future. Stay tuned!

1) GPT-5 System Card., OpenAI, August 7, 2025

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