Alignment is a subspace of capability. Feeling good is nice, but it's also a manifestation of the level that the model can predict what I do and don't want it to do. The more accurately it can predict my intentions without me having to spell them out explicitly in the prompt, the more helpful it is.

GPT-5 is good at benchmarks, but benchmarks are more forgiving of a misaligned model. Many real world tasks often don't require strong reasoning abilities or high intelligence, so much as the ability to understand what the task is with a minimal prompt.

Not every shop assistant needs a physics degree, and not every physics professor is necessarily qualified to be a shop assistant. A person, or LLM, can be very smart while at the same time very bad at understanding people.

For example, if GPT-5 takes my code and rearranges something for no reason, that's not going to affect its benchmarks because the code will still produce the same answers. But now I have to spend more time reviewing its output to make sure it hasn't done that. The more time I have to spend post-processing its output, the lower its capabilities are since the measurement of capability on real world tasks is often the amount of time saved.

GPT was clearly changed after its sycophantic models lead to the lawsuits.