OpenAI just released GPT-5.2 — the latest iteration of its flagship reasoning model.
The new model is already live on Overchat AI, and you can start using GPT-5.2 today.
Read on for the answers to these questions and more.
GPT-5.2 is a flagship-level reasoning model released in December 2025 by OpenAI.
According to OpenAI, GPT-5.2 delivers significant improvements in:
The company designed it specifically for professional knowledge work, with early testing showing it saves ChatGPT Enterprise users 40–60 minutes a day on average.
The model comes in three configurations:
For those who were skeptical about GPT-5.2, here’s the good news. GPT-5.2 is, without a doubt, a big upgrade over GPT-5.1, as it beats the previous iteration in almost all benchmarks — despite rushing the release, OpenAI delivered something amazing.
The biggest gains are in professional knowledge work. On GDPval, an evaluation measuring well-specified tasks across 44 occupations, GPT-5.2 Thinking beats or ties top industry professionals on 70.9% of comparisons — nearly double GPT-5.1's 38.8% win rate.
In other words, this model can do a job as well as a senior grade specialist can, if not better.
Here’s how GPT 5.2 compares to GPT 5.1 in benchmarks:
SWE-Bench Pro measures performance on challenging coding tasks. GPT-5.2 achieved a score of 55.6% on this notoriously difficult benchmark, which tests four programming languages. While 5% may not sound like much, it’s a significant improvement, especially in terms of front-end development and complex UIs.
For example, here’s a wave simulation app GPT-5.2 created in a single prompt:
Another big improvement is the substantial reduction in hallucinations, with GPT-5.2 generating 30% fewer fabricated responses than GPT-5.1. When tested on a set of real ChatGPT queries, the proportion of responses containing errors fell from 8.8% to 6.2%, making the model a more reliable tool for research, writing and analysis.
In terms of understanding long contexts, GPT-5.2 is the first OpenAI model to achieve almost 100% accuracy on the 4-needle MRCR variant at 256k tokens. This means that you can provide the model with very large documents, spreadsheets or files, and it will retain all of that information and answer accurately.
We usually find that smarter, more accurate models are much slower, which is a typical trade-off between speed and quality. However, according to OpenAI's internal metrics, GPT-5.2 Thinking produces outputs for professional tasks at 11x the speed of expert professionals, while costing less than 1% as much.
Let's compare GPT-5.2 against the leading models from Google, Anthropic, and DeepSeek.
GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro are the two most powerful AI models available. Here’s how they compare:
GPT-5.2 is actually winning on SWE-bench Verified (80.0% vs. 76.2%). This percentage difference is significant and will result in a notably better developer experience with fewer mistakes and higher-quality code from the outset.
In other areas, however, Gemini 3 Pro is still in the lead. For example, multimodal understanding is one of its key strengths, and despite OpenAI's advances in this area, Gemini is still better at understanding the content of videos and images.
In practice, however, you’ll find that both models are extremely reliable for professional work.
The choice between them boils down to what kind of tasks you typically work on:
Released by Anthropic in November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5 was one of the models that outperformed GPT-5.1, triggering OpenAI's code red response.
Claude Opus 4.5 at the time of release was the world's best model for coding, agents and computer use. It has incredible benchmark scores, and many developers praise its ability to create complex front ends from simple text prompts. So, how does it compare to GPT-5.2?
On paper, at least, Claude Opus 4.5 still outperforms GPT-5.2 when it comes to solving real-world tasks, with an SWE-bench Verified score of 80.9% versus 80.0%. However, the difference is minimal.
Both models represent the cutting edge of AI software engineering and will be an excellent AI coding companion.
However, when it comes to abstract reasoning, as measured by ARC-AGI-2, GPT-5.2 is far superior to Claude, with scores of 52.9% and 37.6% respectively. This suggests a greater ability to solve novel, abstract problems.
DeepSeek V3.2 is a model that differs greatly from those created by Western private AI companies, as the team behind it focuses on efficiency, developing an extremely powerful model that costs 10x less to run compared to Claude or Gemini. But can it beat GPT-5.2?
GPT-5.2 outperforms DeepSeek in maths, coding and scientific reasoning. That being said, DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale isn’t far behind, particularly in the HMMT February 2025 maths benchmark, where the difference is just 0.2%.
It’s also important to remember that DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale costs just 42 cents per million API tokens, making it around four times cheaper than GPT-5.2, which costs $1.75 per million input tokens. Furthermore, it is fully open-source, whereas GPT-5.2 remains closed.
This is in response to pressure from Gemini 3 Pro. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has declared an internal code red, urging teams to speed up development after Google's Gemini 3 model outperformed ChatGPT in almost all benchmarks.
That’s because, when Gemini 3 launched in November 2025, it performed better than GPT-5.1 in reasoning, coding, and general intelligence tests, so GPT-5.2 is specifically designed to eliminate these weaknesses.
In fact, Google's Gemini 3 delivered what Google called a new era of intelligence, becoming the world’s best model for reasoning, coding, and multimodal processing at the time of release. OpenAI's CEO even praised the release, and industry leaders such as Salesforce's Marc Benioff publicly announced that they were switching from ChatGPT after just two hours with Gemini 3.
Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 also outperforms GPT-5.1 in multiple benchmarks, particularly for coding. All of this prompted Sam Altman to bring forward the release of the next iteration.
Also read: What is the best AI model in 2025/2026?
GPT-5.2 focuses on three core areas:
This is to close the performance gap that opened when Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 pulled ahead.
According to The Verge, GPT-5.2 was fine-tuned as a reasoning model and OpenAI’s internal tests show that it beats Gemini 3 in reasoning benchmarks, though official numbers aren’t yet available.
The model is technically ready for launch. OpenAI is now deciding the exact timing, with December 9 emerging as the target date. However, final testing could force a postponement if they find critical bugs before release.
The team used fine-tuning and targeted improvements to make GPT-5.2 better than Gemini 3, but in terms of the long-term vision, OpenAI is working on a project codenamed 'Garlic', which will feature an entirely new model architecture.
Rumor has it that Garlic could be released as GPT-5.5 or GPT-6 in early 2026.
Garlic aims to create a smaller model that retains the knowledge base of a much larger system. This approach would dramatically reduce computing costs while improving response times. Early benchmarks suggest strong performance in programming tasks, indicating that OpenAI's future strategy relies on efficiency gains rather than raw scale.
The dual approach makes sense. GPT-5.2 stabilizes OpenAI's position in the near term, while Garlic positions the company for sustained leadership through 2026 and beyond.
Development Priorities Have Shifted
To accelerate GPT-5.2, OpenAI has temporarily slowed other projects. Work on digital assistants and early advertising tools has been deprioritized as teams focus on ensuring the next release feels like a meaningful leap forward.
OpenAI has released GPT-5.2 just a few weeks after releasing GPT-5.1 because Google and Anthropic have released models that are better at coding and solving difficult problems.
Chat with GPT-5.2 on Overchat AI.
OpenAI's goal is to create the best model in the world. They believe that GPT-5.2 is better than Gemini 3 Pro, and reports suggest it performs better than other models when dealing with complex tasks. If that's true, it means that the best model in the world might be about to be released.
With that said, November 2025 saw the release of so many flagship models — Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude both released their best models, and DeepSeek's recent V3.2 release showed that open-source models can now compete with, and even outperform, proprietary systems while costing 10 times less to run. Does OpenAI have what it takes to become the best AI model developer?
We'll update this article with benchmarks and real-world performance data once GPT-5.2 officially launches.
GPT-5.2 was released in early December 2025. OpenAI moved the release forward from its original late-December timeline in response to competitive pressure from Google's Gemini 3.
GPT-5.2 is an intermediate update to the GPT model line-up, released just weeks after GPT-5.1. This is in response to the fact that Gemini 3 Pro and Claude 4.5 Opus performed better than GPT 5.1 on coding and reasoning benchmarks.
GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro are currently the two most powerful AI models available. They perform similarly on most benchmarks, with GPT-5.2 achieving better results in some areas and Gemini 3 Pro in others.
Project Garlic is a next-generation AI model with entirely new architecture that could be launched as GPT-5.5 or GPT-6 in early 2026. The project makes a smaller model that uses the knowledge from a larger system. This means that computing costs are reduced, response times are made faster and programming performance is improved.
