\n
![](\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2025\/12\/chatgpt-on-smartphone-1280x848.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
On Thursday, OpenAI announced the release of GPT-5.5, the latest update to its flagship model. It is exactly as much of an upgrade as the jump from 5.4 to 5.5 would suggest.<\/p>\n
The company called the model its \u201cmost intuitive to use\u201d and a \u201cnext step toward a new way of getting work done on a computer,\u201d which seems like the kind of thing you say when you don\u2019t have major improvements to show right now. In a blog post, it did say that the model runs faster than previous iterations and shows \u201cgains\u201d in \u201cagentic coding, computer use, knowledge work, and early scientific research\u2014areas where progress depends on reasoning across context and taking action over time.\u201d For now, we\u2019ll have to take their word on that.<\/p>\n
On X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed his excitement for GPT-5.5, stating, \u201cI personally like it.\u201d Wow. Altman also praised the team behind it, saying, \u201cReally excellent work by the inference team to serve this model so efficiently,\u201d in reference to the model\u2019s reportedly improved performance. \u201cTo a significant degree, we have to become an AI inference company now,\u201d he said. Altman has also been reposting praise, including a post from Magic Path CEO Pietro Schirano that said GPT-5.5 gave him \u201cmy first taste of AGI.\u201d<\/p>\n
As is always the case when companies push a new model update, OpenAI has included a slew of benchmarks that suggest its output is better than ever. It notes that it tops rival Anthropic\u2019s Claude Opus 4.7, that company\u2019s newest publicly available model, in several cybersecurity standards and computer-use benchmarks that test an AI agent\u2019s ability to operate autonomously. However, the company is still lagging behind Anthropic in coding tests. Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das said OpenAI\u2019s model doesn\u2019t reach state-of-the-art status when it comes to coding capabilities.<\/p>\n
And of course, Anthropic would probably argue that Claude Opus 4.7 isn\u2019t even the model that should be the standard. When the company dropped that model last week, it loaded up basically every benchmark with evidence that its Claude Mythos Preview, the too-powerful-to-be-made-public model that it\u2019s only giving out limited access to, blows away all the alternatives, including Opus.<\/p>\n
Regardless, GPT-5.5 seems like an incremental improvement over GPT-5.4. And it\u2019s becoming unclear just how useful benchmarks really are for evaluating these tools. Increasingly, companies train to the test, and when they\u2019re pushed in unexpected ways, they still break. How much anyone outside of the industry really cares about these test scores also seems questionable.<\/p>\n
But you definitely can\u2019t say that OpenAI isn\u2019t iterating. Over the past week, the company announced a new image generation model, \u201cworkspace agents\u201d that can complete tasks autonomously, a model for detecting and redacting personally identifiable information in text, and dropped an update to its coding agent Codex. Sam Altman\u2019s army is definitely pumping out updates, even if they all start to blend together.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n