OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5.2, its most advanced model series to date, positioning it as a major leap forward for professional knowledge work amid intensifying competition in the AI chatbot market.
According to the company, GPT-5.2 is designed to unlock greater economic value for users, with marked improvements in spreadsheet creation, presentation building, coding, image perception, long-context understanding, tool usage, and the execution of complex, multi-step projects.
OpenAI noted that “GPT-5.2 sets a new state of the art across many benchmarks, including GDPval,” where it outperformed industry professionals on well-specified knowledge work tasks spanning 44 occupations.
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Within ChatGPT, GPT-5.2 Instant, Thinking, and Pro are rolling out beginning with paid plans, while developers can already access the models through the API. Overall, GPT-5.2 delivers significant gains in general intelligence, long-context reasoning, agentic tool-calling, and vision, making it more capable of handling real-world tasks end-to-end than previous generations.
GPT-5.2 Thinking is positioned as the strongest model yet for professional use. On OpenAI’s internal benchmark covering junior investment banking analyst tasks—such as building three-statement financial models and leveraged buyout models—GPT-5.2 Thinking achieved an average score 9.3 percentage points higher than GPT-5.1 Thinking, improving from 59.1% to 68.4%.
Side-by-side evaluations showed notable advances in both the sophistication and formatting of generated spreadsheets and presentations.
Access to these enhanced spreadsheet and presentation features in ChatGPT requires a Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise subscription, with users selecting GPT-5.2 Thinking or Pro. OpenAI cautioned that complex generations may take several minutes to complete.
In software development, early testers reported that GPT-5.2 Thinking significantly outperforms its predecessor in front-end engineering, particularly for complex or unconventional user interfaces, including 3D elements. This has positioned the model as a powerful daily tool for engineers across the stack.
Jeff Wang, CEO of Windsurf, described the release as a major milestone, stating that GPT-5.2 represents the biggest leap in agentic coding since GPT-5 and delivers state-of-the-art performance within its price range.
In his words,
“GPT-5.2 represents the biggest leap for GPT models in agentic coding since GPT-5 and is a SOTA coding model in its price range. The version bump undersells the jump in intelligence. We’re excited to make it the default across Windsurf and several core Devin workloads.”
The model also sets a new benchmark in long-context reasoning, achieving leading results on OpenAI’s MRCRv2 evaluation, which measures a system’s ability to integrate information across lengthy documents.
The launch follows Google’s recent introduction of Gemini 3, its most advanced AI model to date, which expanded reasoning and multimodal capabilities. The renewed competition marks a sharp contrast to three years ago, when Google declared a “Code Red” in response to ChatGPT’s rapid rise and its perceived threat to search.
In a recent twist, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly issued his own “Code Red” internally, citing Google’s Gemini 3 and the broader escalation of the frontier AI race. In an internal memo to staff, Altman said OpenAI would reallocate resources to further strengthen ChatGPT, delaying other initiatives, including advertising plans.
The rollout of GPT-5.2 is expected to further intensify competition among leading AI developers as the battle for dominance in advanced generative models accelerates.