OpenAI launched its latest frontier model, GPT-5.2, on Thursday amid increasing competition from Google, pitching it as its most advanced model yet and one designed for developers and everyday professional use.
OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 is coming to ChatGPT paid users and developers via the API in three flavors: Instant, a speed-optimized model for routine queries like information-seeking, writing, and translation; Thinking, which excels at complex structured work like coding, analyzing long documents, math, and planning; and Pro, the top-end model aimed at delivering maximum accuracy and reliability for difficult problems.
“We designed 5.2 to unlock even more economic value for people,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said Thursday during a briefing with journalists. “It’s better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long context, using tools and then linking complex, multi-step projects.”
GPT-5.2 lands in the middle of an arms race with Google’s Gemini 3, which is topping LMArena’s leaderboard across most benchmarks (apart from coding – which Anthropic’s Claude Opus-4.5 still has on lock).
Early this month, The Information reported that CEO Sam Altman released an internal “code red” memo to staff amid ChatGPT traffic decline and concerns that it is losing consumer market share to Google. The code red called for a shift in priorities, including stalling on commitments like introducing ads and instead focusing on creating a better ChatGPT experience.
GPT-5.2 is OpenAI’s push to reclaim leadership, even as some employees reportedly asked for the model release to be pushed back so the company could have more time to improve it. And despite indications that OpenAI would focus its attention on consumer use cases by adding more personalization and customization to ChatGPT, the launch of GPT-5.2 looks to beef up its enterprise opportunities.
The company is specifically targeting developers and the tooling ecosystem, aiming to become the default foundation for building AI-powered applications. Earlier this week, OpenAI released new data showing enterprise usage of its AI tools has surged dramatically over the past year.
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This comes as Gemini 3 has become tightly integrated into Google’s product and cloud ecosystem for multimodal and agentic workflows. Google this week launched managed MCP servers that make its Google and Cloud services like Maps and BigQuery easier for agents to plug into. (MCPs are the connectors between AI systems and data and tools.)
OpenAI says GPT-5.2 sets new benchmark scores in coding, math, science, vision, long-context reasoning, and tool-use, which the company claims could lead to “more reliable agentic workflows, production-grade code, and complex systems that operate across large contexts and real-world data.”
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