The rumors were true: OpenAI on Thursday announced the release of its new frontier large language model (LLM) family, GPT-5.2.It comes at a pivotal moment for the AI pioneer, which has faced intensifying pressure since rival Google’s Gemini 3 LLM seized the top spot on major third-party performance leaderboards and many key benchmarks last month, though OpenAI leaders stressed in a press briefing that the timing of this release had been discussed and worked on well in advance of the release of Gemini 3.OpenAI describes GPT-5.2 as its “most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work,” aiming to reclaim the performance crown with significant gains in reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows.”It’s our most advanced frontier model and the strongest yet in the market for professional use,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, said during a press briefing today. “We designed 5.2 to unlock even more economic value for people. It’s better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long context, using tools, and handling complex, multi-step projects.”GPT-5.2 features a massive 400,000-token context window — allowing it to ingest hundreds of documents or large code repositories at once — and a 128,000 max output token limit, enabling it to generate extensive reports or full applications in a single go.The model also features a knowledge cutoff of August 31, 2025, ensuring it is up-to-date with relatively recent world events and technical documentation. It explicitly includes “Reasoning token support,” confirming the underlying architecture uses the chain-of-thought processing popularized by the “o1” series.The ‘Code Red’ Reality CheckThe release arrives following The Information’s report of an emergency “Code Red” directive to OpenAI staff from CEO Sam Altman to improve ChaTGPT — a move reportedl …
