Less than three years ago, OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT, catching tech giants like Google and Meta off guard—and rapidly mushrooming into one of the most powerful startups in Silicon Valley, now valued at $300 billion and reportedly in talks for a new potential sale of stock for current and former employees at a $500 billion valuation.
But 2025 has become a ruthless race for AI dominance, and OpenAI has struggled to remain the undisputed pace-setter against a growing field of rivals developing advanced LLM models. On Thursday, OpenAI took a major step in its effort to reassert its leadership with the launch of GPT-5, the long awaited update to its flagship AI product and its most powerful and fastest model yet.
The company said the model delivers “more accurate answers than any previous reasoning model,” and is “much smarter across the board,” reflected by strong performance on academic and human-evaluated benchmarks. Its research blog noted new state-of-the-art performance across math, coding and health questions, and found that GPT-5 outperformed other OpenAI models across tasks spanning over 40 occupations including law, logistics, sales and engineering. In addition, it is being billed as “one unified system” that provides “the best answer, every time,” with no need to pick from what was becoming a laundry list of different OpenAI models.
“GPT-5 really feels like talking to a PhD level expert in any topic,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told journalists in a pre-briefing on Wednesday. “Something like GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable in any other time in history.”
Altman described GPT-5 as a “significant step” along the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which according to OpenAI’s mission statement is defined as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
OpenAI is making its latest AI model free to all ChatGPT users—the first time free users will have access to one of its reasoning models—as well as through an API that lets developers and businesses build on top of it. OpenAI is also rolling out some new ChatGPT features: Users can choose from four pre-set personalities—Cynic, Robot, Listener, and Nerd—to customize how the AI responds, while Pro users will soon be able to connect Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts, allowing ChatGPT to reference that information automatically during chats. Voice mode is also getting an upgrade, with more adaptive and expressive responses.
It’s unclear whether this combination of speed, power and features will be enough, however. Some two years in the making (GPT-4 was launched in March 2023), GPT-5’s launch has taken longer than many industry insiders expected, as OpenAI has adjusted its approach in response to industry changes. And while ChatGPT now boasts an impressive 700 million weekly users, OpenAI has faced growing pressure over the past year as rivals poach its talent and race ahead on emerging AI techniques like long-context reasoning and autonomous tool use. In addition to Big Tech competitors like Meta and Google, OpenAI must contend with a wave of startups founded by its own former researchers, including Anthropic, Thinking Machines, and Safe Superintelligence. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has emerged as a particularly aggressive rival, forming a new Superintelligence team that has lured away several top OpenAI scientists. And in January, Chinese upstart DeepSeek briefly knocked OpenAI back on its heels—part of a growing flood of powerful Chinese models now vying for global influence.
