Topline
OpenAI launched its most advanced language model Thursday with the release of GPT-5, a flagship product the company says will enhance ChatGPT as it reportedly nears a $500 billion valuation and aims to stave off competitors in Google, Anthropic and more.
OpenAI called GPT-5 its “smartest, fastest, most useful model yet,” emphasizing improvements in coding, math, writing and health-related questions.
GPT-5 can answer questions more quickly and is less susceptible to hallucinations (when a language model accidentally produces incorrect or misleading results) than earlier models, according to OpenAI.
The language model is rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team and Free users Thursday and will release to Enterprise and Education users in one week.
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OpenAI calls GPT-5 its flagship model, putting it in direct competition with large commercial competitors like xAI’s Grok 4 model, Google’s Gemini 2.5 and Anthropic’s Claude 4. China-based DeepSeek’s V3 model is also competing for users in the AI market. xAI CEO Elon Musk said on the heels of the GPT-5 launch that Grok 5 will “be out before the end of this year and it will be crushingly good.” It is unclear when Google or Anthropic will release the next versions of Gemini or Claude.
The release of GPT-5 has been fueled by an unprecedented funding surge, as OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round in March that marked the largest private tech funding round ever. The company, according to multiple outlets, is in early talks with investors about a stock sale for current and former employees at a $500 billion valuation, a massive jump from its previous valuation of $300 billion.
Hallucinations have become an increasingly prevalent problem among OpenAI and other AI firms’ products. OpenAI said in an April report its GPT-o3 and o4-mini models have hallucinated 30%-50% of the time, and it’s not entirely clear why. DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model hallucinates more than the company’s traditional models, according to independent tests from AI research firm Vectara. Hallucinations can happen at each step throughout an AI model’s thinking process, particularly when prompts require information outside of a model’s data bank. Researchers have largely found that fully stopping hallucinations is impossible, meaning the most AI companies can do with new models is work to reduce hallucination rates by as much as possible. In GPT-5’s case, its responses are about 45% less likely to contain factual errors than responses made by GPT-4o, according to OpenAI.
OpenAI has framed GPT-5 as a more thorough model with deeper reasoning and improved task-handling, mostly improving on previous models as opposed to bringing brand new features to the table. OpenAI published data showing higher accuracy from GPT-5 in answering PhD-level science questions and handling coding tasks. GPT-5 is also better at drafting and editing reports, emails and more, with OpenAI noting the language model can provide more detailed and helpful answers. The company says when it comes to health-related questions, GPT-5 is “more like an active thought partner” than previous models, saying it adapts to users’ context, knowledge level and geography when answering questions.
ChatGPT has traditionally relied on refusal-based safety training, which would lead language models to either comply or refuse prompts from users—an approach OpenAI says is good for handling explicitly malicious prompts, but not as efficient in handling prompts where “the user’s intent is unclear, or information could be used in benign or malicious ways.” Examples of malicious prompts include asking the chatbot to provide information on how to carry out illegal activity or asking it to write scripts for malware. GPT-5 instead uses a training known as safe completions, which helps the model provide helpful answers without exceeding safety boundaries. This means GPT-5 could partially answer user questions it would have refused to in the past, and if it needs to refuse providing an answer, the model will “transparently tell you why it is refusing, as well as provide safe alternatives,” according to OpenAI.
The Information, citing unnamed sources at OpenAI and Microsoft, reported before Thursday’s release that GPT-5's improvements would not be comparable to the leaps made between previous versions, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. One issue behind the purported lack of developments is "a dwindling supply of high-quality web data" used to train the model, The Information reported.
GPT-5 will be integrated into several consumer, business and developer products from Microsoft, the company announced, bolstering services like Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Azure AI Foundry.
In the leadup to GPT-5’s launch, OpenAI has released two AI assistants this year, announcing “ChatGPT Agent” and “Operator” as models specifically designed to handle task management, from purchasing ingredients and submitting expenses to web tasks like purchasing tickets and making online grocery orders. The assistants are offshoots of the GPT language models, which have had new versions of themselves released every year and are used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. ChatGPT is slated to reach 700 million weekly users this week, according to CNBC, marking a fourfold increase from last year, when GPT-4o was launched.
OpenAI in Talks for Share Sale at $500 Billion Valuation (Bloomberg)
OpenAI Launching ‘ChatGPT Agent’—Here’s What To Know (Forbes)