GPT-3.5 Turbo · 0125
Pinned January 2024 snapshot of GPT-3.5 Turbo.
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
Specs & capabilities
How GPT-3.5 Turbo · 0125 stacks up — intelligence, speed, context, and modalities.
Intelligence
Low
Speed
Slow
Context window
16,385 tokens
Max output
4,096 tokens
Knowledge cutoff
September 1, 2021
Supported endpoints
v1/chat/completions · v1/responses · v1/assistants · v1/batch · v1/fine-tuning
Input and output
Input: Text
Output: Text
Availability notes
Fine-tuning supported
Frequently asked questions
How much does GPT-3.5 Turbo 0125 cost?
$0.50 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens — approximately 20x cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo.
What is the context window?
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.
What did the 0125 update actually fix?
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.
What is GPT-3.5 Turbo 0125 not well suited for?
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.
How does it compare to GPT-4o mini?
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.
Is this model still being updated?
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.