OpenAI launches new GPT-5 model for all ChatGPT users

OpenAI on Thursday announced GPT-5, its latest and most advanced large-scale artificial intelligence model.

The company is making GPT-5 available to everyone, including its free users. OpenAI said the model is smarter, faster and “a lot more useful,” particularly across domains like writing, coding and health care.

“I tried going back to GPT-4, and it was quite miserable,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a briefing with reporters.

Since launching its AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has rocketed into the mainstream. The company said it expects to hit 700 million weekly active users on ChatGPT this week, and it is in talks with investors about a potential stock sale at a valuation of roughly $500 billion, as CNBC previously reported.

OpenAI said GPT-5’s hallucination rate is lower, which means the model fabricates answers less frequently. The company said it also carried out extensive safety evaluations while developing GPT-5, including 5,000 hours of testing. 

Instead of outright refusing to answer users’ questions if they are potentially risky, GPT-5 will use “safe completions,” OpenAI said. This means the model will give high-level responses within safety constraints that can’t be used to cause harm. 

“GPT-5 has been trained to recognize when a task can’t be finished, avoid speculation and can explain limitations more clearly, which reduces unsupported claims compared to prior models,” said Michelle Pokrass, a post-training lead at OpenAI.

During the briefing, OpenAI demonstrated how GPT-5 can be used for “vibe coding,” which is a term for when users generate software with AI based on a simple written prompt. 

The company asked GPT-5 to create a web app that could help an English speaker learn French. The app had to have an engaging theme and include activities like flash cards and quizzes as well as a way to track daily progress. OpenAI submitted the same prompt into two GPT-5 windows, and it generated two different apps within seconds. 

The apps had “some rough edges,” an OpenAI lead said, but users can make additional tweaks to the AI-generated software, like changing the background or adding additional tabs, as they see fit.

GPT-5 is rolling out to OpenAI’s Free, Plus, Pro and Team users on Thursday. This launch will be the first time that Free users have access to a reasoning model, which is a type of model that “thinks,” or carries out an internal chain of thought, before responding. If Free users hit their usage cap, they’ll have access to GPT-5 mini.

OpenAI’s Plus users have higher usage limits, and Pro users have unlimited access to GPT-5 as well as access to GPT-5 Pro. ChatGPT Edu and ChatGPT Enterprise users will get access to GPT-5 roughly a week from Thursday.

“It’s hard to believe it’s only been two and a half years since @sama joined us in Redmond to show the world GPT-4 for the first time in Bing, and it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come since that moment,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a Thursday X post, referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s appearance at Microsoft headquarters in Washington in February 2023.

The new model is coming to Microsoft products Thursday, according to a company blog post. Microsoft 365 Copilot is getting GPT-5, as well as the Copilot for consumers and the Azure AI Foundry that developers can use to incorporate AI models into third-party applications.

Box, a company that helps enterprises manage their computer files, has been testing GPT-5 across a wide variety of data sets in recent weeks.  

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, said previous AI models have failed many of the company’s most advanced tests because they struggle to make sense of complex math or logic within long documents. But Levie said GPT-5 is a “complete breakthrough.” 

“The model is able to retain way more of the information that it’s looking at, and then use a much higher level of reasoning and logic capabilities to be able to make decisions,” Levie told CNBC in an interview. 

OpenAI is releasing three different versions of the model for developers through its application programming interface, or API. Those versions, gpt-5, gpt-5-mini and gpt-5-nano, are designed for different cost and latency needs. 

Earlier this week, OpenAI released two open-weight language models for the first time since it rolled out GPT-2 in 2019. Those models were built to serve as lower-cost options that developers, researchers and companies can easily run and customize.

But with GPT-5, OpenAI also has a broader consumer audience in mind. The company said interacting with the model feels natural and “more human.” 

Altman said GPT-5 is like having a team of Ph.D.-level experts on hand at any time. 

“People are limited by ideas, but not really the ability to execute, in many new ways,” he said. 

–CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this post