OpenAI releases GPT-5.2 after Sam Altman's ‘Code Red’ as competition between ChatGPT, Gemini heats up—what's new?

A month after its last ChatGPT update, OpenAI on Thursday announced GPT-5.2, a little over a week after Sam Altman declared a 'Code Red' amid intense competition with Google's Gemini 3.

"We are introducing GPT‑5.2, the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work," OpenAI said in its release note.

“Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision—making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.” Open AI added.

While GPT-5.2 is the latest update from OpenAI, executives from the firm said that it would be incorrect to view the latest update a a response to Gemini 3, as per Axios.

Reports, earlier, had speculated that GPT-5.2 could arrive this week, given the ‘Code Red’ situation.

What's new in GPT-5.2?

OpenAI said that while heavy users of ChatGPT Enterprise say that it saves them up to 10 hours a week, GPT-5.2 is meant to be even more efficient that the 5.1 model.

GPT-5.2 will be notably better than its predecessor in creating spreadsheets, making presentations, writing code, understanding images, comprehending long contexts, using tools, and handling complex, multi-step tasks, Open AI said.

OpenAI also highlighted GPT-5.2's prowess in coding, including reviews from early testers who had some time to experiment with the latest model.

The reviews were glowing: “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,” the Jeff Wang, the CEO of Windsurf, was quoted as saying to name one.

GPT 5.2 benchmarks

OpenAI also said that GPT-5.2 had reached new highs in benchmark tests for thinking, with scores showing a marked improvement by the latest model over GPT-5.1 in abstract thinking .

GPT-5.2 Instant, Thinking, and Pro will begin rolling out in ChatGPT on Thursday itself, beginning with paid plans.

Competition with Google's Gemini

After declaring 'Code Red' early December, signalling an existential threat to its product amid increasing competition from Google's Gemini, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave a surprising response to CNBC on Thursday, saying that the launch of Gemini 3 had a lesser impact than he had anticipated.

“I believe that when a competitive threat happens, you want to focus on it, deal with it quickly,” Altman told CNBC, adding that he expects his company to exit the 'Code Red' situation by the end of January 2022.

Alphabet's Google launched its latest version of Gemini around mid-November, highlighting Gemini 3's lead position on several popular industry leaderboards that measure the performance of AI models.

“Gemini 3 Pro can bring any idea to life with its state-of-the-art reasoning and multimodal capabilities. It significantly outperforms 2.5 Pro on every major AI benchmark,” Google had announced, adding that the launch of Gemini 3 was “another big step on the path toward” artificial general intelligence (AGI).