With the launch of GPT-5, it’s interesting to see how OpenAI cleaned up the “model selection dropdown” which is something I wrote about a few weeks ago.
It went from this:
To this:
Most importantly, they took a big step towards abstracting away model selection entirely. Now, GPT-5 decides how much to use reasoning, and with some guidance from the user, what other tools to access.
It is interesting that they left the dropdown there at all as it’s hard to imagine many people will proactively select “GPT-5 Thinking” given this is already embedded in the flagship model. My guess is there’s some contingent that wants to hold on to this “container feature” perhaps as a way to launch new model versions and features in beta. Or potentially, it’s a temporary test to see if people still select the Thinking version of the model now that the Flagship model can access this automatically.
In my initial experiments with the Flagship model, it does a pretty good job of gauging how much reasoning is needed based on the prompt, so I suspect this design element will dissapear entirely in the next few months as very few people actively select the Thinking model.