GPT-5
Frontier reasoning depth with best-in-class reliability.
About GPT-5
GPT-5 is OpenAI's unified flagship — a single model that scales its reasoning effort up or down to match the task, rather than making you pick a separate variant. The result shows up most clearly in hard technical work: a perfect AIME 2025 score with tools, 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified, and a 1.6% error rate on medical benchmark HealthBench make it one of the more capable models available for code, math, and domain-specific research. Its 400,000-token context window handles large codebases and lengthy documents without truncation. Users consistently praise the step-up in accuracy and the meaningful reduction in hallucinations over GPT-4o. The honest caveat: GPT-5 trades warmth for precision. Early adopters widely noted that responses are shorter, cooler, and noticeably less conversational than its predecessor — a real shift if personality and back-and-forth rapport matter to your workflow. Latency is also substantial; extended reasoning produces a time-to-first-token around 68 seconds, which rules it out for anything requiring snappy replies.
Best for
- Advanced coding and software engineering tasks requiring multi-step reasoning
- Mathematical problem-solving at competition and graduate level
- Medical and scientific research where accuracy outweighs response speed
- Visual analysis of complex diagrams, charts, and technical screenshots
- Long-form technical writing, documentation, and deep document analysis
Specs & capabilities
How GPT-5 stacks up — intelligence, speed, context, and modalities.
Intelligence
High
Speed
Medium
Context window
400,000 tokens
Knowledge cutoff
September 30, 2024
Frequently asked questions
What does GPT-5 cost?
Via the OpenAI API, GPT-5 is priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens.
How large is GPT-5's context window?
The base model supports 400,000 tokens of context, making it well-suited for large codebases, long documents, or extended research sessions.
Why does GPT-5 sometimes take a long time to respond?
GPT-5 can spend extra time on extended reasoning for complex tasks. This boosts accuracy significantly but pushes time-to-first-token to around 68 seconds in high-effort mode — well above the industry median of roughly 2–3 seconds. If you need fast replies, it is not the right fit.
How does GPT-5 compare to GPT-4o?
GPT-5 is considerably stronger on benchmarks — particularly math, coding, and factual accuracy — but users widely report it feels colder and less witty than GPT-4o. It is the better choice for precision-heavy work; GPT-4o remains preferred for conversational or creative tasks.
Is GPT-5 a single model?
Yes. On the API, GPT-5 is one model with an adjustable reasoning-effort setting — you control how much it thinks. The automatic switching people sometimes describe is a feature of the ChatGPT app's product layer, not the GPT-5 model itself.
What is GPT-5's knowledge cutoff?
GPT-5's training data has a cutoff of September 30, 2024. Events or publications after that date are outside its knowledge unless you provide context directly.