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GPT-5, wellness tech getting close to pseudoscience & what Sizzlers say

Plus: Come on an internet road trip with some strangers

Author

Cam Wilson
August 08, 2025

Edition 2392

Hey all! What a week. Just as I was finishing this up, the Information Commissioner announced it’s suing Optus over the 2022 hack (OAIC). The news never stops. Have a great weekend!

The News

OpenAI’s big new model is evolution, not revolution

OpenAI has released its long-awaited new model GPT-5 (OpenAI). It’s supposedly “smarter, faster, more useful, and more accurate, with a lower hallucination rate than previous models” (WIRED, $). In terms of actual feature changes: ChatGPT will now decide which of its various weirdly named models variants to use based on the task given, has different “personalities” and can connect to Google Calendar and Gmail (The Verge)

Hard to argue with this kind of statistical analysis

The Sizzle: As the AI company, there’s a lot of people watching to see what OpenAI has come up with after hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and two years since GPT-4 — practically a millennium in hype cycles. The reception? Blogger Simon Willison summed it up best: “It doesn’t feel like a dramatic leap ahead from other LLMs but it exudes competence—it rarely messes up, and frequently impresses me”. Or, as AI skeptic Gary Marcus said, it’s no whale.

That being said: I think even iterative, moderate improvements to the GPT-5 and, more importantly, better UI/product features might go a long way. Remember, the brilliance of the iPod wasn’t that it invented new technology, but that it pieced it all together. I’m not saying that this is that kind of leap — but shrinking AI model gains isn’t a death sentence for the technology.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Fitness and health tech ‘wellness’ features skate dangerously close to pseudoscience

Whoop is arguing with America’s medical device regulator that it shouldn’t have oversight over its fitness tracker devices because they’re just for “wellness” (The Verge). The FDA says Whoop’s “blood pressure insights” feature is not a low-risk, medical application because it’s about diagnosing/measuring potential health issues. Whoop, like many other device makers, says their features are “diagnostic adjacent”: i.e. how Apple Watch measures “breathing disturbances” and not sleep apnea detection.

The Sizzle: I think it’s probably understated how often legit fitness/health tech devices and the data they produce skate dangerously close to bullshit or pseudoscience. Like with AI, we assume that consumer tech is accurate and good at what they say they do. This ranges from heart rate monitoring to antioxidant measuring (The Verge). But frequently, these devices are either not accurate enough or overly confident about giving insight into our bodies that just isn’t right or trustworthy.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

What Sizzlers are saying

  • There were a lot of good recommendations for finding the right USB-C cord on the forum.

  • M0les agreed that dead people AI avatars are “digital bong-rip thoughts that are just going to have downstream costs and tarnish what good [possible uses of the technology] there is.”

  • On Slack, rossb responded to Microsoft’s support for mass Palestinian surveillance: “The Microsoft story is very reminiscent of IBM’s work with the Nazi Party in the 1930s.”

  • Forum user mkeating said they had their own version of the Rolling Laptop That Screams back when laptops used to have 56k modems.

  • James shared on Slack a delightful pair of Microsoft Windows XP Crocs.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

  • Jim Chalmers flags AI as key focus of economic reform roundtable (ABC News)

  • ‘Unfair and absurd’: AI boss says tech giants should pay to train (Australian Financial Review, $)

  • Review: CarlinKit Mini Ultra Wireless CarPlay (James Cridland's blog)

  • Nearly 90% of Iranians now use a VPN to bypass internet censorship - here's everything we know (TechRadar)

  • Fake WhatsApp developer libraries hide destructive data-wiping code (BleepingComputer)

  • Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About (Techdirt)

  • Google sales data breached in the same scam it discovered (Ars Technica)

  • Google is fixing a bug that caused its Gemini chatbot to express self-loathing and say 'I am a failure' (Business Insider, $)

  • Are Watermarks the Answer to AI-Generated Content? Maybe Not (IEEE Spectrum)

  • After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide and suffers psychosis (Ars Technica)

  • X plans to show ads in Grok chatbot's answers (Engadget)

  • Swedish prime minister admits to using AI chatbots for insight (TechSpot)

  • Encryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked, Researchers Find (WIRED, $)

  • VibeChart (VibeChart)

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Come on an internet road trip with some strangers

I found this super cute website Internet Road Trip that combines Google Street View with a voting feature, radio player and a chat box. The result is a Twitch Plays Pokemon-style traversing through the world which is pretty fun just to leave on in the background. When I was watching, we were somehow inside a Canadian car showroom? Anyway, enjoy!

That Kia does look pretty nifty.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electronics & electrical

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.

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