AI Quick Tips 271: OpenAI’s latest model - GPT -5.2

In what was reported as mainly a response to Google’s release of Gemini 3, OpenAI rushed/released their own new model - GPT-5.2.  

This is how they describe GPT-5.2 -

GPT 5.2 is our newest flagship model for enterprise and agentic workflows, designed to deliver higher accuracy, stronger instruction following, and more disciplined execution across complex workflows.  Building on GPT-5.1. GPT-5.2 improves token efficiency on medium-to-complex tasks, produces cleaner formatting with less unnecessary verbosity, and shows clear gains in structured reasoning, tool grounding, and multimodal understanding.

That was a lot of syllables.  Basically, they expect that it will work better.  

In my usage, so far, it is about the same as GPT-5.1.  To be fair, I haven’t really pushed it so it may be “better” (than the model that came out a month earlier…)  It has been slower than GPT-5.1 but that could be from the wave of people stress testing it because it is new.  Time will tell.

Here is what OpenAI lists as the Key Behavioral Differences (syllable warning) -

• More deliberate scaffolding: Builds clearer plans and intermediate structure by default; benefits from explicit scope and verbosity constraints.
• Generally lower verbosity: More concise and task-focused, though still prompt-sensitive and preference needs to be articulated in the prompt.
• Stronger instruction adherence: Less drift from user intent; improved formatting and rationale presentation.
• Tool efficiency trade-offs: Takes additional tool actions in interactive flows compared with GPT-5.1, can be further optimized via prompting.
• Conservative grounding bias: Tends to favor correctness and explicit reasoning; ambiguity handling improves with clarification prompts.

There’s gotta be a better way to say this stuff.

There is also a video that I made to go over some of this stuff: