OpenAI launches GPT-5 with major upgrades: What’s new, how to access it, and all you need to know

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled GPT-5, the latest version of the artificial intelligence system behind ChatGPT, calling it its “best model yet for coding and agentic tasks” and making it available to free users for the first time.

The fifth-generation model arrives more than two years after GPT-4, in a period marked by feverish investment, hype and concern over AI’s potential.

Chief executive Sam Altman described the release as “a pretty significant step” toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), the idea that machines could surpass humans at economically valuable work.

“GPT-5 is really the first time one of our mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate PhD-level expert anything,” Altman said. “We wanted to simplify it and make it accessible. We wanted to make it available in our free tier for the first time."

What’s new in GPT-5

According to OpenAI, GPT-5 is faster, more accurate, and more versatile than its predecessors, with major upgrades in writing, coding, health advice, and multimodal reasoning.

The model is designed as a “unified system” that decides in real time whether to use a standard or deeper reasoning mode, depending on the complexity of the query. It can also switch to smaller, faster versions when usage limits are reached.

Key improvements include:

The company says GPT-5 was trained on Microsoft Azure AI supercomputers and is about 45% less likely than GPT-4o to produce factual errors, with reasoning mode cutting that rate even further.

How it compares to GPT-4

Where the outgoing default GPT-4o emphasised speed and multimodal input, GPT-5 focuses on reliability in complex tasks, more honest communication of its limits, and stronger performance in academic and professional benchmarks.

It also introduces “safe completions”, which provide nuanced answers that balance helpfulness with safety, instead of outright refusals.

In internal tests, GPT-5 with reasoning matched or outperformed human experts in half of the evaluated cases, while using fewer words to reach solutions.

How to access GPT-5

GPT-5 is now the default model in ChatGPT for signed-in users, replacing GPT-4o and other previous versions. Paid subscribers get higher usage limits and can manually select “GPT-5 Thinking” for maximum reasoning. Free users will gradually gain access, though with lower quotas. Once free users reach their GPT‑5 usage limits, they will transition to GPT‑5 mini.

Enterprise and education customers will have access from next week. Developers can use GPT-5 in three sizes – gpt-5, gpt-5-mini, and gpt-5-nano – through the API.