OpenAI releases GPT-5.2 after Sam Altman issues code red over Google's Gemini 3 challenge

Reviewed byNidhi Govil

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OpenAI launched GPT-5.2 in three versions—Instant, Thinking, and Pro—following CEO Sam Altman's internal code red directive earlier this month. The release responds to mounting competitive pressure from Google's Gemini 3, which has been topping benchmarks and gaining market share. The new AI model promises enhanced capabilities across coding, math, and professional knowledge work.

OpenAI Launches GPT-5.2 Amid Intensifying AI Competition

OpenAI released GPT-5.2 on Thursday, introducing its newest AI model family in three distinct versions: Instant, Thinking, and Pro

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. The launch arrives amid heightened competitive pressure from Google, following CEO Sam Altman's internal code red memo earlier this month that redirected company resources toward improving ChatGPT

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. "We designed 5.2 to unlock even more economic value for people," said Fidji Simo, OpenAI's chief product officer, during a press briefing with journalists

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. The AI model demonstrates improvements across creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, and handling complex multi-step projects.

Source: VentureBeat

Source: VentureBeat

Enhanced Capabilities Target Professional Use Cases

GPT-5.2 features a 400,000-token context window, enabling it to process hundreds of documents simultaneously, with a knowledge cutoff date of August 31, 2025

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. The three model tiers serve distinct purposes for professional use: Instant handles faster tasks like writing and translation, Thinking tackles complex work including coding and math through simulated reasoning, and Pro delivers the highest-accuracy performance for difficult problems

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. Long-context understanding capabilities should help professionals maintain accuracy when analyzing lengthy reports, contracts, and documents

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. The model is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers, with API access available to developers at $1.75 per million input tokens for the standard model—a 40 percent increase over GPT-5.1

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Benchmarks Show Gains Against Gemini 3 and Anthropic

According to shared benchmarks, GPT-5.2 Thinking scored 55.6 percent on SWE-Bench Pro, a software engineering benchmark, compared to 43.3 percent for Gemini 3 Pro and 52.0 percent for Claude Opus 4.5

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. On GPQA Diamond, a graduate-level science benchmark, the model scored 92.4 percent versus Gemini 3 Pro's 91.9 percent

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. OpenAI says GPT-5.2 Thinking beats or ties human professionals on 70.9 percent of tasks in the GDPval benchmark, completing these tasks at more than 11 times the speed and less than 1 percent of the cost of human experts

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. The model also generates responses with 38 percent fewer hallucinations than GPT-5.1, according to Max Schwarzer, OpenAI's post-training lead

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. In AIME 2025, a test involving 30 challenging mathematics problems, the model earned a perfect 100 percent score, beating GPT-5.1's already state-of-the-art score of 94 percent

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Code Red Response to Google's Market Share Gains

The release follows Sam Altman's internal code red directive after Google's Gemini 3 model topped multiple AI benchmarks and gained market share

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. The memo called for delaying other initiatives, including advertising plans for ChatGPT, to focus on improving the chatbot's core experience

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Source: Seeking Alpha

Source: Seeking Alpha

Google's Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users, while OpenAI reports 800 million weekly active users for ChatGPT

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. The stakes for OpenAI are substantial—the company has made commitments totaling $1.4 trillion for AI infrastructure buildouts over the next several years, bets it made when it had a more obvious technology lead among AI companies

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. Some employees reportedly asked for the model release to be pushed back so the company could have more time to improve it

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Strategic Positioning for Enterprise and Developer Markets

GPT-5.2 represents OpenAI's third major model release since August, following a steady clip of updates as the company attempts to maintain its competitive position

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. The launch specifically targets developers and the tooling ecosystem, aiming to become the default foundation for building AI-powered applications

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Source: Lifehacker

Source: Lifehacker

Coding startups like Windsurf and CharlieCode report state-of-the-art agent coding performance and measurable gains on complex multi-step workflows

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. Research lead Adain Clark explained that stronger math scores serve as a proxy for whether a model can follow multi-step logic, keep numbers consistent over time, and avoid subtle errors—properties that matter across financial modeling, forecasting, and data analysis

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. OpenAI plans to keep GPT-5.1 available in ChatGPT for paid users for three months under a legacy models dropdown

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