OpenAI has officially launched GPT-5.2, its most advanced model to date, designed specifically for professional knowledge work. The release comes after a week of anticipation and appears to be a strategic response to recent competitive launches from Google and Anthropic.
Key Highlights of GPT-5.2
- OpenAI released GPT-5.2 on Thursday as its latest flagship model
- The model was fast-tracked to maintain competitiveness with Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Opus 4.5
- GPT-5.2 is specifically optimized for professional tasks and claims to rival expert-level performance
Designed for Professional Productivity
OpenAI describes GPT-5.2 as “the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work.” Building on research showing that AI saves the average worker up to an hour daily, this new model aims to significantly expand those productivity gains.
“We designed GPT-5.2 to unlock even more economic value for people; it’s better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long contexts, using tools, and handling complex, multi-step projects,” the company stated.
The model’s development was reportedly accelerated following Google and Anthropic’s competitive releases of Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5, respectively.
Professional-Grade Performance
According to OpenAI, GPT-5.2 “outperforms industry professionals at well-specified knowledge work tasks spanning 44 occupations.” The company evaluated the model using GDPval, an in-house benchmark released in September that measures the economic value AI models produce.
GPT-5.2 Thinking scored an impressive 70.9% on GDPval, compared to GPT-5.1 Thinking’s score of 38.8%. This represents a significant leap in handling typical knowledge work tasks like spreadsheet creation and presentation building.
“GPT-5.2 Thinking produced outputs for GDPval tasks at >11x the speed and <1% the cost of expert professionals, suggesting that when paired with human oversight, GPT-5.2 can help with professional work,” OpenAI noted.
Competitive Benchmarking
OpenAI tested GPT-5.2 against several competing models, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and xAI’s Grok 4. While Claude Opus 4.1 scored highest overall, particularly in aesthetic tasks like document formatting, GPT-5.2 excelled in accuracy and domain-specific knowledge retrieval.
Enhanced Vision and Context Understanding
The new model features significantly improved long-context reasoning and vision capabilities. These enhancements enable professionals to maintain accuracy when analyzing lengthy reports, contracts, and other documents.
“Compared to previous models, GPT-5.2 Thinking has a stronger grasp of how elements are positioned within an image, which helps on tasks where relative layout plays a key role in solving the problem,” OpenAI explained. The model demonstrates superior understanding of spatial arrangement and can identify bounding boxes even in low-quality images.
Superior Coding Capabilities
GPT-5.2 showed measurable improvements over GPT-5.1 Thinking across several industry-standard benchmarks, including AIME 2025 for mathematics and SWE-Bench Pro for software engineering. The model achieved a new state-of-the-art score of 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 less manual developer intervention. OpenAI also highlighted GPT-5.2’s improved front-end capabilities, particularly for “complex or unconventional UI work” and 3D elements.
Reduced Hallucination Rate
One of the most significant improvements is a 30% reduction in hallucinations compared to GPT-5.1 Thinking. This should provide enterprise users with greater confidence when using the model for research and analysis tasks.
However, OpenAI emphasizes that users should still verify any claims made by the model, as some risk of hallucination remains inherent to all AI systems.
Enhanced Safety Features
OpenAI has strengthened GPT-5.2’s ability to handle sensitive conversations, reporting “fewer undesirable responses in both GPT-5.2 Instant and GPT-5.2 Thinking as compared to GPT-5.1 and GPT-5 Instant and Thinking models.”
The company has made “meaningful improvements in how they respond to prompts indicating signs of suicide or self-harm, mental health distress, or emotional reliance on the model.”
Additionally, OpenAI is developing an age prediction model that will “automatically apply content protections for users who are under 18, in order to limit access to sensitive content.”
How to Access GPT-5.2
GPT-5.2 began rolling out to paid ChatGPT users on Thursday, following OpenAI’s standard deployment pattern with Instant, Thinking, and Pro versions for different use cases. Developers can access all three versions immediately through the API.
Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users can utilize the model’s spreadsheet and presentation features by selecting the Thinking or Pro modes.
No Immediate Deprecation Plans
OpenAI has assured users that it has “no current plans to deprecate GPT-5.1, GPT-5, or GPT-4.1 in the API and will communicate any deprecation plans with ample advance notice for developers.”
This statement addresses concerns from users who reacted negatively when earlier models were briefly deprecated during the GPT-5 launch last summer.
The Mysterious ‘Garlic’ Model
Recent reports revealed that OpenAI is also developing another model, codenamed Garlic. While the relationship between Garlic and GPT-5.2 remains unclear, sources suggest GPT-5.2 (and a forthcoming GPT-5.5) may be versions of Garlic.
According to reports, OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Mark Chen informed colleagues that Garlic performed well in company evaluations compared to Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 in tasks involving coding and reasoning.
When developing Garlic, OpenAI addressed issues with pretraining—the initial training phase where models learn from massive datasets. These improvements enable OpenAI to infuse smaller models with knowledge previously reserved for larger ones, potentially reducing costs and improving deployment efficiency.
The Battle for AI Dominance
The intense competition between Google and OpenAI reflects both companies’ focus on the consumer market. In contrast, Anthropic has positioned itself differently, targeting enterprise customers rather than consumers.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently noted that his company isn’t facing the same “code red” panic as its competitors because of this strategic difference. Anthropic’s Claude Code agentic coding tool recently reached $1 billion in run-rate revenue, just six months after public launch.
As the AI race continues to intensify, GPT-5.2 represents OpenAI’s latest move to maintain its competitive edge in an increasingly crowded field of advanced language models.
