OpenAI launches GPT-5 free to all ChatGPT users

On Thursday, OpenAI announced GPT-5 and three variants—GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano—what the company calls its "best AI system yet," with availability for some of the models across all ChatGPT tiers, including free users. The new model family arrives with claims of reduced confabulations, improved coding capabilities, and a new approach to handling sensitive requests that OpenAI calls "safe completions."

It's also the first time OpenAI has given free users access to a simulated reasoning AI model, which breaks problems down into multiple steps using a technique that tends to improve answer accuracy for logical or analytical questions.

GPT-5 represents OpenAI's latest attempt to unify its various AI capabilities into a single system. The company says the GPT-5 family acts as a "unified system" with a smart, efficient model that answers most questions, a deeper reasoning model called "GPT-5 thinking" for harder problems, and a real-time router that decides which approach to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and user intent. Like GPT-4o, GPT-5 is a multimodal system that can interact via images, voice, and text.

The rollout starts today, extending to ChatGPT's 700 million weekly active users, with varying usage limits based on subscription tier. Pro subscribers will receive unlimited access to GPT-5 and the GPT-5 Pro variant, while Plus users receive "significantly higher usage limits" compared to free users, according to a statement from OpenAI. GPT-5 Pro is replacing o3-pro in ChatGPT for those subscriber tiers with access to it.

Technical improvements and new features

Since the launch of GPT-4 in 2023, we've seen a trend of relative diminishing returns in terms of jumps in capability between major AI model releases. In that sense, the jump in contextual processing capability between GPT-3 and GPT-4 felt shockingly large. The jump between GPT-4 (if you consider the original 2023 version) and GPT-5 is still significant, but when you consider intermediate releases like GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1, and o3-pro, GPT-5 feels like an incremental upgrade that is unlikely to shock anyone.