OpenAI fires back at Google with GPT 5.2 upgrade: All the details

ChatGPT

OpenAI has officially unveiled GPT 5.2 for ChatGPT, positioning it as the company’s most capable model series for professional knowledge work. The timing is telling. The announcement comes just days after reports suggested OpenAI was accelerating the release in response to Google’s latest Gemini models. An internal “code red”, triggered by Google’s progress, appears to have pushed the upgrade out earlier than planned.

GPT 5.2 is pitched as a significant step up from the GPT 5.1 model that replaced GPT-5 in mid-November. While GPT 5.1 focused on creating a warmer and more natural experience, GPT 5.2 focuses squarely on capability. According to OpenAI, the new model offers major improvements in economic productivity tasks. It is better at generating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing production-grade code, parsing visual inputs, handling tool-based workflows and managing long, multi-step projects.

The company claims GPT 5.2 sets a new benchmark across several industry tests, including GDPval, where it reportedly outperforms human professionals across 44 occupations. OpenAI says the gains come from improvements in general intelligence, long-context comprehension, agentic behaviour and vision capabilities. The result, it says, is a model that can execute complex, real-world tasks from start to finish with more reliability than any earlier ChatGPT release.

The speed of this upgrade is notable. OpenAI shipped GPT-5 on 7 August, describing it as a major refresh with automatic routing between sub-models for faster or deeper responses. Then, in November, it swapped GPT-5 for GPT-5.1, calling it a more thoughtful and intelligent model. Now GPT 5.2 arrives barely a month later, signalling how rapidly the AI race is evolving and how fiercely OpenAI aims to compete.

GPT 5.2 should feel sharper, more capable and more dependable with longer documents, tougher reasoning challenges and professional workloads. And with Google’s Gemini models pushing hard for the top spot, this is unlikely to be the last rapid upgrade we see.