OpenAI has launched GPT-5, a new flagship AI model that will power the company’s next generation of ChatGPT.
GPT-5, which was released Thursday, is OpenAI’s first “unified” AI model and combines the reasoning abilities of its o-series of models with the fast responses of its GPT-series. The next-generation model signals a new era for ChatGPT — and its creator, OpenAI — pointing to OpenAI’s broader ambitions to develop AI systems that are more like agents than chatbots.
While GPT-4 enabled AI chatbots to offer smart responses on a wide variety of questions, GPT-5 allows ChatGPT to complete a wide variety of tasks on behalf of users — such as generating software applications, navigating a user’s calendar, or creating research briefs. With GPT-5, OpenAI has also sought to make ChatGPT simpler to use. Instead of asking users to choose the right settings, GPT-5 comes equipped with a real-time router that decides how to offer the best answer, whether that’s responding to user questions quickly or taking additional time to “think” through answers.
Credit: OpenAI
During a briefing with reporters, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed GPT-5 is “the best model in the world,” and said it represented a “significant step” along the company’s path to developing AI that can outperform humans at most economically valuable work, or AGI.
“Having something like GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable at any previous time in history,” said Altman.
Starting Thursday, GPT-5 will be available to all free users of ChatGPT as their default model. OpenAI’s VP of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said this is part of the company’s effort to give free users access to an AI reasoning model for the first time. (Previously, the company gated these more advanced models behind a paywall.)
“This is just one of the ways that I’m excited to live the mission, making sure that this stuff actually benefits people,” said Turley on the decision, referencing OpenAI’s longstanding mission to distribute advanced AI to as many people as possible.
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The expectations are high for GPT-5, one of OpenAI’s most anticipated product launches since ChatGPT put the company on the map in 2022. Since then, ChatGPT has grown into one of the world’s most popular consumer products, reaching more than 700 million users every week — nearly 10% of the globe’s population, according to the company.
Many see GPT-5 as a bellwether for AI progress broadly, and the model’s reception by Silicon Valley could have profound implications for Big Tech, Wall Street, and policymakers regulating technology. These stakeholders are watching to see if GPT-5 offers a significant jump in AI’s capabilities, much like its predecessor, GPT-4, which challenged expectations of what software can do.
GPT-5 offers a slight edge on the competition
OpenAI claims GPT-5 is state-of-the-art in several domains, slightly edging out leading AI models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Elon Musk’s xAI on key benchmarks. However, GPT-5 slightly underperforms frontier AI models in other areas.
The company says GPT-5 offers frontier-level performance around coding; Altman said the model specifically excels at spinning up entire software applications on demand, in what’s become known as “vibe coding.”
On SWE-bench Verified — a test of real world coding tasks pulled from GitHub — GPT-5 scores 74.9% on its first attempt. That means GPT-5 just outperforms Anthropic’s latest Claude Opus 4.1 model, which scored 74.5%, and Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which scored 59.6%.
On Humanity’s Last Exam — a difficult test measuring AI model performance across math, humanities, and the natural sciences — a version of GPT-5 with extended reasoning (GPT-5 pro) scored 42% when usi …