openai gpt-5 release day summary

published: August 7, 2025

openai released gpt-5 on august 7, 2025 as a unified system combining fast responses with reasoning capabilities. the model is available through chatgpt and api with multiple size variants.

📝 raw research notes: comprehensive notes from release day including all sources, papers, and datasets analyzed.

overview

model variants

modelinput costoutput costcontextnotes
gpt-5$1.25/1m$10/1m400kfull model
gpt-5-mini$0.25/1m$2/1m400kmid-size
gpt-5-nano$0.05/1m$0.40/1m400ksmallest
gpt-5-chat-latest$1.25/1m$10/1m400knon-reasoning
gpt-5 pro--400kextended reasoning

pricing from developer documentation and api pricing.

system architecture

benchmarks

mathematics

benchmarkgpt-5gpt-5 proo3notes
aime 202594.6%-86.4%no tools
hmmt 202593.3%-81.7%no tools
gpqa diamond85.7%88.4%83.3%no tools
frontiermaths26.3%-15.8%python only

coding

benchmarkgpt-5o3improvement
swe-bench verified74.9%69.1%+5.8%
aider polyglot88.0%79.6%+8.4%
swe-lancer$112k$86k+30%

swe-bench performance uses 22% fewer output tokens and 45% fewer tool calls than o3.

multimodal

benchmarkgpt-5o3gpt-4o
mmmu84.2%82.9%74.8%
charxiv reasoning81.1%78.6%56.7%
videommmu84.6%83.3%60.9%

tool use

benchmarkgpt-5previous sota
τ2\tau^2-bench telecom96.7%49%1
scale multichallenge69.6%41.4%2
collie99.0%-

factuality

metricgpt-5o3gpt-4o
factual errors vs gpt-4o45% fewer-baseline
hallucination rate (longfact)1.0%5.2%0.7%
factscore hallucination2.8%23.5%6.7%
deception rate2.1%4.8%-

api features

reasoning effort comparison

new minimal value for fastest responses. parameter affects depth of analysis.

low reasoning (fast, minimal analysis)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5",
    reasoning_effort="low",
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": "My distributed cache shows inconsistent data. Node A: '123', Node B: '456'. Both healthy."
    }]
)

output:

Check:
1. Clock synchronization between nodes
2. Replication lag
3. Write conflicts
4. Network partitions
5. Cache invalidation logs

high reasoning (thorough chain-of-thought)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5",
    reasoning_effort="high",
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": "My distributed cache shows inconsistent data. Node A: '123', Node B: '456'. Both healthy."
    }]
)

output:

The inconsistency suggests a synchronization issue. Let me analyze systematically:

**Root Cause Analysis:**
Since both nodes report healthy but have different values, this rules out node failures.
The different values (123 vs 456) suggest either:
- Split-brain scenario with concurrent writes
- Replication failure after a write
- Clock skew causing version conflicts

**Debugging Steps (in order):**
1. Verify write patterns: grep 'user:5' /var/log/cache/writes.log
2. Check vector clocks: redis-cli DEBUG OBJECT user:5
3. Examine replication: redis-cli INFO replication
4. Test consistency level with QUORUM writes
5. Review partition history

**Most likely cause:** Write conflict during network partition.

verbosity control comparison

controls answer length while maintaining completeness.

low verbosity (concise)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5",
    verbosity="low",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is Raft consensus?"}]
)

output:

Raft is a consensus algorithm for managing replicated state machines.
Use for: distributed databases, configuration stores, service discovery.
Provides: strong consistency, leader election, log replication.
Not for: high-throughput streaming, eventual consistency needs.

high verbosity (comprehensive)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5",
    verbosity="high",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is Raft consensus?"}]
)

output includes: core components, how it works (6 steps), when to use (5 perfect cases, 4 avoid cases), real-world examples (etcd, cockroachdb, consul, tikv), trade-offs, implementation tips.

combined parameters for optimization

fastest response (minimal + low)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5-nano",  # $0.05/1M input
    reasoning_effort="minimal",
    verbosity="low",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Optimize: SELECT * FROM orders WHERE created_at > '2024-01-01'"}]
)

output: immediate suggestion with index recommendation.

thoughtful analysis (high + medium)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5",
    reasoning_effort="high",
    verbosity="medium",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Optimize: SELECT * FROM orders WHERE created_at > '2024-01-01'"}]
)

output: multiple strategies based on data distribution, specific column selection, required indexes, alternative query with cte.

custom tools

supports plaintext tool calls with regex or context-free grammar constraints instead of json.

deployment

availability

integrations

safety

preparedness framework

deception metrics

adoption metrics

enterprise customers

bny mellon, california state university, figma, intercom, lowe’s, morgan stanley, softbank, t-mobile, uber.

technical papers

factuality benchmarks

  • longfact4: thousands of questions across 38 topics, safe evaluator with 72% human agreement
  • factscore5: atomic fact evaluation, less than 2% error rate
  • scale multichallenge2: multi-turn conversation evaluation

tool use benchmarks

datasets

health performance

scores significantly higher than any previous model on healthbench, evaluation based on realistic scenarios and physician-defined criteria. 46.2% on healthbench hard.

developer feedback

cursor

“gpt-5 is the smartest coding model we’ve used” - michael truell, ceo

windsurf

“has half the tool calling error rate over other frontier models”

vercel

“it’s the best frontend ai model”

comparison with gpt-oss

aspectgpt-5gpt-oss
licenseproprietaryapache 2.0
deploymentapi onlyopen weights
context400k128k
architectureunified systemmoe
quantization-mxfp4

limitations

resources


Footnotes

  1. τ2\tau^2-bench paper: previous sota was 49% from sierra.ai publication 2

  2. scale multichallenge: claude 3.5 sonnet achieved 41.4% 2

  3. brad lightcap, openai coo, twitter announcement, august 2025

  4. longfact paper

  5. factscore paper

  6. charxiv reasoning

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