OpenAI launches GPT-5 free to all ChatGPT users

On Thursday, OpenAI introduced its latest offering, GPT-5, alongside three variants—GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano. The company touts GPT-5 as its most advanced AI system to date, making it accessible to all ChatGPT users, including those on the free tier. This new model family is designed to minimize inaccuracies, enhance coding skills, and provide a novel approach to sensitive queries through a feature known as "safe completions." For the first time, free users can access a simulated reasoning AI model that breaks down complex problems into manageable steps, improving the accuracy of responses to logical and analytical questions. GPT-5 aims to consolidate OpenAI's diverse AI capabilities into a cohesive system. The company describes the GPT-5 family as a "unified system," featuring a highly efficient model that answers general inquiries, a more advanced reasoning model called "GPT-5 thinking" for complex challenges, and a real-time router that determines the best response strategy based on the type of conversation, its difficulty, required tools, and user intent. Similar to GPT-4o, GPT-5 is a multimodal system that can engage with users through text, images, and voice. The rollout begins today, reaching ChatGPT's 700 million weekly active users, with varying usage limits depending on their subscription tier. Pro subscribers will enjoy unrestricted access to both GPT-5 and the GPT-5 Pro variant, while Plus users will experience "significantly higher usage limits" compared to free users, as stated in OpenAI's press release. With the introduction of GPT-5 Pro, the previous o3-pro model for applicable subscriber tiers will be phased out. Since the launch of GPT-4 in 2023, the AI landscape has seen a trend of diminishing returns with each new release; while the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was significant, the transition to GPT-5, considering prior iterations like GPT-4o and GPT-4.5, appears to be more of an incremental upgrade, which may not come as a surprise to users.