After a week of anticipation, OpenAI has officially launched GPT-5.2, its most advanced model to date, specifically designed to compete with Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s latest releases. The new model promises to revolutionize professional knowledge work with unprecedented capabilities.
A Strategic Response to Competition
OpenAI described GPT-5.2 as “the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work” in Thursday’s announcement. The release comes amid intense competition in the AI industry, with the company reportedly fast-tracking development following competitive launches from Google and Anthropic.
According to OpenAI’s recent research, AI already saves the average worker nearly an hour daily. GPT-5.2 is engineered to expand on these productivity gains significantly, offering enhanced capabilities across multiple domains.
Professional-Grade Performance
The company designed GPT-5.2 to unlock substantial economic value for users. The model excels at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long contexts, using tools, and handling complex, multi-step projects.
In benchmark testing, GPT-5.2 demonstrated impressive results. On GDPval, an internal benchmark measuring economic value across 1,320 tasks spanning 44 occupations, GPT-5.2 Thinking scored 70.9% compared to GPT-5.1 Thinking’s 38.8%. This represents a dramatic improvement in handling typical knowledge work tasks.
Perhaps most striking, GPT-5.2 Thinking produced outputs for professional tasks at more than 11 times the speed and less than 1% the cost of expert professionals, suggesting significant potential when paired with human oversight.
Enhanced Coding Capabilities
The model achieved notable improvements in software engineering, scoring a new state-of-the-art 55.6% on SWE-Bench Pro, which measures software engineering capabilities across four programming languages. This translates to better production code debugging, feature implementation, and fix deployment with reduced manual intervention.
OpenAI highlighted GPT-5.2’s improved front-end capabilities, particularly for complex or unconventional UI work and 3D elements, making it a powerful tool for developers across various specializations.
Improved Accuracy and Vision
GPT-5.2 Thinking demonstrates 30% fewer hallucinations compared to version 5.1, a crucial improvement for enterprise users relying on the model for research and analysis. While users should still verify AI-generated claims, this reduction represents significant progress in reliability.
The model’s enhanced vision capabilities allow for more accurate interpretation of diagrams, dashboard images, screenshots, and other visual data. OpenAI noted that GPT-5.2 Thinking has a stronger grasp of spatial positioning within images, particularly valuable for tasks where relative layout plays a key role.
Safety and Responsible AI
OpenAI emphasized closer training on handling sensitive conversations, with fewer undesirable responses compared to previous versions. The company reported meaningful improvements in responding to prompts indicating suicide or self-harm signs, mental health distress, or emotional reliance on the model.
An age prediction model is currently being rolled out to automatically apply content protections for users under 18, limiting access to sensitive material.
Access and Availability
GPT-5.2 began rolling out to paid ChatGPT users on Thursday, with Instant, Thinking, and Pro versions available for different tasks. Developers can access all three versions immediately through the API.
Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users can access the model’s spreadsheet and presentation features by selecting Thinking or Pro modes.
Model Continuity
OpenAI assured users that it has no current plans to deprecate GPT-5.1, GPT-5, or GPT-4.1 in the API, addressing concerns from users who reacted negatively to previous model deprecations. The company promised to communicate any future deprecation plans with ample advance notice.
The Mysterious ‘Garlic’ Project
Reports suggest OpenAI is developing another model codenamed “Garlic,” though its relationship to GPT-5.2 remains unclear. According to sources, Garlic performed well in company evaluations compared to Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 in coding and reasoning tasks.
The development of Garlic reportedly involved addressing pretraining issues, focusing the model on broader connections before training for specific tasks. These changes enable OpenAI to infuse smaller models with knowledge previously reserved for larger models, potentially reducing costs and improving deployment efficiency.
The Battle for Market Dominance
The fierce competition between Google and OpenAI centers largely on the consumer market. While Anthropic focuses on enterprise clients—recently announcing that Claude Code reached $1 billion in run-rate revenue just six months after launch—OpenAI and Google are racing to capture individual users.
As the AI landscape continues evolving rapidly, GPT-5.2 represents OpenAI’s latest effort to maintain its competitive edge. Whether it can truly surpass Gemini 3 will ultimately depend on real-world testing and user adoption in the coming weeks.
