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ZDNET's key takeaways
GPT-5 Pro delivers the sharpest, most actionable code analysis.
A detail-focused prompt can push base GPT-5 toward Pro results.
o3 remains a strong contender despite being a GPT-4 variant.
With the big news that OpenAI has released GPT-5, the team here at ZDNET is working to learn about and communicate its strengths and weaknesses. In another article, I put its programming prowess to the test and came up with a less-than-impressive result.
Also: I tested GPT-5's coding skills, and it was so bad that I'm sticking with GPT-4o
When Deep Research first appeared with the OpenAI o3 LLM, I was quite impressed with what it could understand from examining a code repository. I wanted to know how well it understood the project just from the available code.
In this article, I'm examining how well the three GPT-5 variants do in examining that same code repository. We'll dig in and compare them. The results are quite interesting. Here are the four models.
o3: a GPT-4 variant optimized for reasoning.
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