- Type
- Multimodal large language model
- Developed by
- OpenAI
- Released
- August 2025
- Predecessor
- GPT-4 / GPT-4o
- Access
- ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI API
- Successors
- GPT-5.2, GPT-5.5
- Type
- Multimodal large language model
- Developed by
- OpenAI
- Released
- August 2025
- Predecessor
- GPT-4 / GPT-4o
- Access
- ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI API
- Successors
- GPT-5.2, GPT-5.5
GPT-5 is the fifth major generation of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) family developed by OpenAI. Released on 7 August 2025, it is a multimodal model capable of processing and reasoning over text and images, and it was made available through ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the OpenAI API. Its defining architectural idea is unification: rather than shipping separate fast and slow models, GPT-5 operates as a single system that decides when to answer quickly and when to spend additional computation "thinking" through a problem before responding.
Design and capabilities
Earlier OpenAI products drew a hard line between conversational models optimised for speed, such as GPT-4o, and dedicated reasoning models, such as the o-series, that traded latency for accuracy on hard problems. GPT-5 merges these behaviours behind an internal router that assesses the difficulty of a request and allocates inference effort accordingly. Simple queries return with low latency, while multi-step mathematical, scientific, or coding tasks trigger longer deliberation.
At release, OpenAI reported state-of-the-art results across several public benchmarks: roughly 94.6% on the AIME 2025 mathematics competition without tool use, 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified for real-world software engineering, 88% on the Aider Polyglot coding benchmark, and 84.2% on the MMMU multimodal understanding test. The company also emphasised reliability, reporting that GPT-5 responses were around 45% less likely to contain a factual error than GPT-4o, and that when the model engaged its reasoning mode, factual errors fell by roughly 80% relative to the earlier o3 model.
Reduced hallucination and health performance
A central claim for GPT-5 was a measurable reduction in hallucination, the tendency of language models to state false information confidently. OpenAI reported improved scores on HealthBench Hard, a demanding medical-reasoning evaluation, alongside broader gains in writing quality and instruction following. These improvements positioned GPT-5 for higher-stakes domains such as clinical decision support, financial analysis, and legal drafting, though OpenAI continued to advise human oversight in all such settings.
Successor models
GPT-5 anchored a rapid release cadence. In December 2025 OpenAI introduced GPT-5.2, described as its flagship reasoning model, with improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and computer vision. In April 2026 the company released GPT-5.5, which focused on agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work, followed by a GPT-5.5 Instant variant positioned as a fast default model for ChatGPT. This sequence reflected an industry-wide shift toward agentic systems that reason across context and take actions over extended tasks rather than producing single-turn answers.
Comparison with peers
GPT-5 competes directly with Anthropic's Claude family, Google's Gemini models, and open-weight alternatives such as Llama and DeepSeek.
| Dimension | GPT-5 approach | | --- | --- | | Reasoning | Unified fast/slow routing in one model | | Modality | Text and image input | | Deployment | Proprietary API and consumer apps | | Positioning | General-purpose assistant and agent backbone |
The competitive landscape in 2025 and 2026 centred less on raw benchmark scores and more on reliability, cost per token, tool-use fidelity, and the ability to sustain multi-step autonomous work.
GPT-5 reaches Malaysian users primarily through Microsoft Copilot and the ChatGPT product, both of which are widely used across Malaysian enterprises. Banks such as Maybank and CIMB, telecommunications operators including TM and Maxis, and government-linked companies have piloted large language models for customer service, document processing, and software development, and GPT-5's reduced hallucination rate is directly relevant to these regulated use cases.
Adoption in Malaysia sits within a maturing governance environment. The Malaysia AI Governance and Ethics guidelines published by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, together with the establishment of the National AI Office (NAIO), set expectations around transparency, accountability, and human oversight that shape how frontier models like GPT-5 are deployed in the public sector.
Data residency and the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) remain practical constraints. Malaysian organisations handling personal or financial data must weigh the convenience of cloud-hosted GPT-5 against regulatory requirements from Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Securities Commission Malaysia (SC), often favouring enterprise deployments with contractual data-handling guarantees over consumer endpoints.
Talent development is supported by HRD Corp funded training programmes and MDEC initiatives, which increasingly include generative AI literacy so that Malaysian professionals can use models such as GPT-5 productively and safely.