On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.2, its newest family of AI models for ChatGPT, in three versions called Instant, Thinking, and Pro. The release follows CEO Sam Altman’s internal “code red” memo earlier this month, which directed company resources toward improving ChatGPT in response to competitive pressure from Google’s Gemini 3 AI model.
“We designed 5.2 to unlock even more economic value for people,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said during a press briefing with journalists on Thursday. “It’s better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long context, using tools and then linking complex, multi-step projects.”
As with previous versions of GPT-5, the three model tiers serve different purposes: Instant handles faster tasks like writing and translation; Thinking spits out simulated reasoning “thinking” text in an attempt to tackle more complex work like coding and math; and Pro spits out even more simulated reasoning text with the goal of delivering the highest-accuracy performance for difficult problems.
GPT-5.2 features a 400,000-token context window, allowing it to process hundreds of documents at once, and a knowledge cutoff date of August 31, 2025.
GPT-5.2 is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers starting Thursday, with API access available to developers. Pricing in the API runs $1.75 per million input tokens for the standard model, a 40 percent increase over GPT-5.1. OpenAI says the older GPT-5.1 will remain available in ChatGPT for paid users for three months under a legacy models dropdown.
Playing catch-up with Google
The release follows a tricky month for OpenAI. In early December, Altman issued an internal “code red” directive after Google’s Gemini 3 model topped multiple AI benchmarks and gained market share. The memo called for delaying other initiatives, including advertising plans for ChatGPT, to focus on improving the chatbot’s core experience.
The stakes for OpenAI are substantial. The company has made commitments totaling $1.4 trillion for AI infrastructure buildouts over the next several years, bets it made when it had a more obvious technology lead among AI companies. Google’s Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users, while OpenAI reports 800 million weekly active users for ChatGPT.
In attempting to keep up with (or ahead of) the competition, model releases proceed at a steady clip: GPT-5.2 represents OpenAI’s third major model release since August. GPT-5 launched that month with a new routing system that toggles between instant-response and simulated reasoning modes, though users complained about responses that felt cold and clinical. November’s GPT-5.1 update added eight preset “personality” options and focused on making the system more conversational.
Numbers go up
Oddly, even though the GPT-5.2 model release is ostensibly a response to Gemini 3’s performance, OpenAI chose not to list any benchmarks on its promotional website comparing the two models. Instead, the official blog post focuses on GPT-5.2’s improvements over its predecessors and its performance on OpenAI’s new GDPval benchmark, which attempts to measure professional knowledge work tasks across 44 occupations.
During the press briefing, OpenAI did share some competition comparison benchmarks that included Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5 but pushed back on the narrative that GPT-5.2 was rushed to market in response to Google. “It is important to note this has been in the works for many, many months,” Simo told reporters, although choosing when to release it, we’ll note, is a strategic decision.
According to the shared numbers, GPT-5.2 Thinking scored 55.6 percent on SWE-Bench Pro, a software engineering benchmark, compared to 43.3 percent for Gemini 3 Pro and 52.0 percent for Claude Opus 4.5. On GPQA Diamond, a graduate-level science benchmark, GPT-5.2 scored 92.4 percent versus Gemini 3 Pro’s 91.9 percent.
OpenAI says GPT-5.2 Thinking beats or ties “human professionals” on 70.9 percent of tasks in the GDPval benchmark (compared to 53.3 percent for Gemini 3 Pro). The company also claims the model completes these tasks at more than 11 times the speed and less than 1 percent of the cost of human experts.
GPT-5.2 Thinking also reportedly generates responses with 38 percent fewer confabulations than GPT-5.1, according to Max Schwarzer, OpenAI’s post-training lead, who told VentureBeat that the model “hallucinates substantially less” than its predecessor.
However, we always take benchmarks with a grain of salt because it’s easy to present them in a way that is positive to a company, especially when the science of measuring AI performance objectively hasn’t quite caught up with corporate sales pitches for humanlike AI capabilities.
Independent benchmark results from researchers outside OpenAI will take time to arrive. In the meantime, if you use ChatGPT for work tasks, expect competent models with incremental improvements and some better coding performance thrown in for good measure.
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