GPT-3.5 Turbo · 0125
Pinned January 2024 snapshot of GPT-3.5 Turbo.
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About GPT-3.5 Turbo · 0125
When the priority is volume and budget over depth, GPT-3.5 Turbo 0125 earns its place. Priced at $0.50 per million input tokens — roughly 20x cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo — this final GPT-3.5 snapshot is built for applications that run at scale rather than wrestle with hard problems. The 0125 release cleaned up a meaningful UTF-8 encoding bug, making structured outputs like JSON and YAML consistently reliable across non-English languages, which is a genuine practical improvement developers have noticed. Users praise its streaming speed and dependable format compliance in chatbot pipelines; the frozen snapshot date also means behavior stays consistent across API calls, which matters for compliance-critical workflows. The honest trade-off: factual accuracy lags well behind GPT-4 variants, and with a September 2021 knowledge cutoff and a 16K context window, it struggles with recent information and longer documents. For straightforward classification, structured data generation, and high-throughput conversational tasks where cost discipline matters, it remains a focused and well-understood tool.
Best for
- High-volume classification and tagging at scale where per-token cost is a primary constraint
- Multilingual chatbots and customer service flows requiring fast streaming and reliable structured output
- JSON, YAML, and XML generation for API integrations, especially in non-English language contexts
- Simple summarization, text reformatting, and document condensing without complex reasoning
- Compliance-sensitive pipelines that need frozen, predictable model behavior across repeated API calls
Specifications
| Provider | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Released | 2024-01 |
| Intelligence | Low |
| Speed | Slow |
| Context window | 16,385 tokens |
| Max output | 4,096 tokens |
| Knowledge cutoff | September 1, 2021 |
| Input price | $0.50 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $1.50 / 1M tokens |
| Request cost | 2 base requests |
| Plan tier | Base |
| Input | Text |
| Output | Text |
| Features | Fine-tuning supported |
| API endpoints | v1/chat/completions, v1/responses, v1/assistants, v1/batch, v1/fine-tuning |
| Model ID | gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 |
Frequently asked questions
$0.50 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens — approximately 20x cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo.
16,385 input tokens with a maximum of 4,096 output tokens. This is significantly smaller than GPT-4 Turbo's 128K window, so long documents may need chunking.
It corrected a UTF-8 encoding bug that caused errors in non-English function calls, improving structured output reliability across multiple languages. It also improved format-following accuracy.
Multi-step reasoning, complex instruction-following, image analysis, and tasks requiring up-to-date knowledge. Its knowledge cutoff is September 2021, and it hallucinates more frequently than GPT-4 variants.
OpenAI itself now recommends GPT-4o mini as a more capable and cost-effective replacement. GPT-4o mini offers better reasoning and accuracy at a comparable price point. GPT-3.5 Turbo 0125 is the final snapshot of its generation.
No. The '0125' suffix reflects a frozen snapshot from January 25, 2024. This is the last major release in the GPT-3.5 Turbo line, and it will not receive further updates.