OpenAI's GPT-5, launched in August 2025, is making waves as the latest iteration of the company's large language models. GPT-5 aims to provide a more natural, accurate, and helpful experience, especially for complex, multi-step requests. It's designed to offer greater reasoning, accuracy, and adaptability compared to its predecessors.

Key Features and Improvements

• Unified System: GPT-5 consolidates previous models like GPT-4o and o3 into a single, intelligent system that adapts on the fly. The system automatically picks the right model for the task, removing the need for manual engine selection. It is a unified system with a smart, efficient model that answers most questions, a deeper reasoning model (GPT‑5 thinking) for harder problems, and a real‑time router that quickly decides which to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and explicit intent.
• Reasoning and Accuracy: GPT-5 is designed with better step-by-step thinking and instruction following capabilities, which reduces the likelihood of inaccurate responses. It is also said to be less likely to hallucinate compared to previous models. GPT-5 responses were 45% less likely to contain a factual error than GPT-4o and 80% less likely than o3 with web search enabled on anonymized prompts.
• Multimodal Capabilities: GPT-5 natively supports text, images, audio, voice, and potentially video, all in one unified interface. This allows users to interact with the model in various ways and receive a single coherent response. On multimodal benchmarks, GPT-5 sets a new state of the art, scoring 84.2% on MMMU (college-level visual reasoning) and 78.4% on MMMU-Pro (graduate-level).
• Coding Prowess: OpenAI touts GPT-5 as its strongest coding model to date, demonstrating improvements in complex front-end generation and debugging larger repositories. It can create responsive websites, apps, and games from natural language prompts. On SWE-bench Verified, GPT-5 scores 74.9%, up from 69.1% for OpenAI o3.
• Writing Capabilities: GPT-5 is also presented as a capable writing collaborator, assisting users in developing and refining ideas into clear, well-structured text. It can translate rough ideas into compelling, resonant writing with literary depth and rhythm.
• Longer Context Window: GPT-5 has an expanded context window, allowing it to understand and reference larger portions of text, leading to more coherent and contextually relevant outputs.
• Agentic Tool Use: GPT-5 shows significant gains in benchmarks that test instruction following and agentic tool use, allowing it to reliably carry out multi-step requests, coordinate across different tools, and adapt to changes in context.

Personalization and Customization

GPT-5 offers more customization options, a better voice mode, and a new user interface. Users can customize the personality of GPT-5 for research use cases. GPT-5 also has several “personalities” (Cynic, Robot, Listener, Nerd) for users to choose from, giving them greater control over a response's tone and style.

Accessibility and Availability

GPT-5 is available to all users, with Plus subscribers getting more usage, and Pro subscribers getting access to GPT‑5 pro, a version with extended reasoning. GPT-5 will be rolling out to all paid Copilot plans. ChatGPT Free and Plus users will have access to GPT-5 and GPT-5 mini, while Pro and Enterprise users will have access to a Pro variant, which can reason for longer.

Reasoning Effort Configurations

GPT-5 offers four reasoning effort configurations: high, medium, low, and minimal. Reasoning effort options steer the model to "think" more or less hard for each query, driving large differences in intelligence, token usage, speed, and cost.

Concerns and Criticisms

Despite the improvements, some users have expressed concerns about the loss of personality and less contextual accuracy compared to GPT-4o. Some benchmarks of GPT-5 have underwhelmed many, with earlier models like GPT-4.5 or even smaller variants outperforming it in key areas.

Overall, OpenAI's GPT-5 aims to be a significant step forward in natural language processing, offering improved speed, accuracy, and a more unified user experience.