ChatGPT is getting another upgrade.
On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a new flagship A.I. model, GPT-5, and began sharing the technology with the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT, the company’s online chatbot.
During a briefing with journalists, OpenAI executives called GPT-5 a “major upgrade” over the systems that previously powered ChatGPT, saying the new technology was faster, more accurate and less likely to “hallucinate,” or make stuff up.
“It feels significantly better in obvious ways and in subtle ways,” OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, said. “GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic — a Ph.D.-level expert.”
Since launching the A.I. boom in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has consistently improved the technology that underpins its chatbot. This began with the release of the company’s GPT-4 technology in the spring of 2023 and continued through a series of A.I. models that could listen, look and talk and approximate the way people reason through complex problems.
OpenAI’s many rivals, including Google, Meta, the start-up Anthropic and China’s DeepSeek, have released similar technologies.
This is the first time that OpenAI has used a so-called reasoning model to power the free version of ChatGPT. Unlike the previous technologies, a reasoning model can spend time “thinking” through complex problems before settling on an answer.
“For most people on ChatGPT, this is their first introduction to reasoning,” said Nick Turley, the OpenAI vice president who oversees ChatGPT. “It just knows when to ‘think.’”
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
OpenAI said that the technology “feels more human” than previous models and that it allowed even novices to build simple software apps from short text prompts. One OpenAI engineer asked the system to generate an online app that could help people learn French, and it created this app in minutes.
Mr. Altman called the system a “significant step” along the path to the ultimate goal of the company and its rivals: artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. But he also acknowledged that it lacked many of the key ingredients needed to build such a machine.
Many experts say there is no clear path to developing A.G.I.
Earlier this week, OpenAI said it was “open sourcing” two other A.I. models that can power online chatbots, freely sharing the technology with researchers and business across the globe. Since unveiling ChatGPT three years ago, the company has mostly kept its technology under wraps. If people use these open-source models, OpenAI hopes they will also pay for its more powerful products.
In addition to offering a free chatbot via the internet, OpenAI sells access to a more powerful chatbot for $20 a month and sells a wide range of A.I. technologies to businesses and independent software developers.
The company is not yet profitable. It plans to raise $40 billion this year and is on a pace to pull in revenues of $20 billion by year’s end.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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