Critics quickly derided OpenAI's newly released GPT-5 for failing tasks that a five-year-old could ace, raising questions about the disparity between hype and performance.

Despite being promoted as 'PhD-level', the model produced a distorted, blob-like map of North America and invented mismatched portraits of US presidents with fictional names.

AI researcher Gary Marcus lowered the threshold by giving GPT-5 a kindergarten-level challenge. The result was a clear fail. He posted: 'GPT-5 failed a kindergarten-level task. Speechless.' He criticised the rushed rollout and the hype that may have obscured the model's visual reasoning weaknesses.

Further tests exposed inconsistencies: when asked to map France and label its 12 most populous cities, GPT-5 returned inaccurate or incomplete results, omitting Paris entirely and naming Orleans despite its lower ranking.

Oddly, when the same queries were posed in text-only form, the model performed better, highlighting the weakness in its image generation and visual logic.