OpenAI Unveils New ChatGPT AI Model, GPT-5

computer screen with ChatGPT chat (Dreamstime)

A smarter and more advanced ChatGPT is here.

OpenAI introduced its newest AI model, called GPT-5, on Thursday.

“GPT-5 is a major upgrade over GPT-4, and a significant step along our path to AGI [artificial general intelligence],” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a YouTube video stream. “We think you will love using GPT-5 much more than any previous AI.”

He added: “With GPT-5, now it is like talking to an expert. A legitimate PhD. level expert in any area you need, on demand, that can help you with whatever your goals are.”

The AI startup said it will launch to both free and paid ChatGPT users on Thursday.

OpenAI says GPT-5 is “our smartest, fastest, most useful model yet.” The company claims the model outperforms all other models on the market for coding, and reached a new record high in the coding benchmark SWE-bench.

Users can change GPT-5’s personality to act more professional, supportive or sarcastic. The model can also access Gmail or Google calendar to offer better personalized answers.

GPT-5 is a reasoning AI model. These type of models reflect more thoroughly on a query by performing numerous thought computations and searching the web for information before they respond.

OpenAI released the first reasoning model o1 in September, followed by o3 in April. Google released a reasoning-capable Gemini model in December, while Anthropic and xAI released reasoning models in February.

The advent of AI reasoning models is accelerating the adoption of chatbots. OpenAI has said ChatGPT’s weekly active users rose to 500 million in March from 300 million in December. On Thursday, the AI start-up said ChatGPT hit 700 million weekly active users this week—four times higher than last year.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com