OpenAI launches GPT-5, its most powerful AI yet—will it be enough to stay ahead in today’s ruthless AI race? 

AI·OpenAIOpenAI launches GPT-5, its most powerful AI yet—will it be enough to stay ahead in today’s ruthless AI race? By Sharon GoldmanBy Sharon GoldmanAI ReporterSharon GoldmanAI ReporterSharon Goldman is an AI reporter at Fortune and co- Eye on AI, Fortune’s flagship AI

She has written digital and enterprise for over a decade.SEE FULL BIO OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesLess than three years ago, OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT, catching giants Google and Meta off guard—and rapidly mushrooming into one of the most powerful startups in Silicon Valley, now valued at $300 billion and reportedly in talks for a new potential sale of stock for current and former employees at a $500 billion valuation

On Thursday, OpenAI took a major step in its effort to reassert its leadership with the launch of GPT-5, the long awaited to its flagship AI duct and its most powerful and fastest model yet

The company said the model ders “more accurate answers than any previous reasoning model,” and is “much smarter across the board,” reflected by strong performance on academic and human-evaluated benchmarks

Its re blog noted new state-of-the-art performance across math, coding and health questions, and found that GPT-5 outperformed other OpenAI models across tasks spanning over 40 occupations including law, logistics, sales and engineering

In addition, it is being billed as “one unified system” that vides “the best answer, every time,” with no need to pick from what was becoming a laundry list of different OpenAI models. “GPT-5 really feels talking to a PhD level expert in any topic,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told journalists in a pre-briefing on Wednesday. “Something GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable in any other time in history.” Altman described GPT-5 as a “significant step” along the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which according to OpenAI’s mission statement is defined as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” OpenAI is making its AI model free to all ChatGPT users—the first time free users will have access to one of its reasoning models—as well as through an API that lets developers and es build on top of it

OpenAI is also rolling out some new ChatGPT features: Users can choose from four pre-set personalities—Cynic, Robot, Listener, and Nerd—to customize how the AI responds, while users will soon be able to connect Gmail, Google Calendar, and s, allowing ChatGPT to reference that information automatically during chats

Voice mode is also getting an upgrade, with more adaptive and expressive responses

It’s un whether this combination of speed, power and features will be enough, however

In addition to Big competitors Meta and Google, OpenAI must contend with a wave of startups founded by its own former reers, including Anthropic, Thinking Machines, and Safe Superintelligence

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has emerged as a particularly aggressive rival, forming a new Superintelligence team that has lured away several top OpenAI scientists

And in January, Chinese upstart DeepSeek briefly knocked OpenAI back on its heels—part of a growing flood of powerful Chinese models now vying for global influence

Whether GPT-5 pels OpenAI back to the top of the AI hill will become in the days and weeks ahead, as reers put the model through its paces, testing it against the s of other elite models, including Anthropic’s Claude model and Google’s Gemini

OpenAI pushes to stay in the lead One of the defining truths the world of generative AI is that even when you’re on top, the lead doesn’t last for long

Now that GPT-5 is out, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that staying at the frontier means one thing: relentless scaling

In AI, scaling refers to the idea that models get more powerful as you increase the amount of data, computing power, and model components used during training

It’s the underlying principle that drove gress from GPT-2 to GPT-3 to GPT-4—and now GPT-5

The catch is that each leap requires exponentially more investment, particularly in AI infrastructure—for OpenAI, that includes its Stargate ject, a joint venture it announced in January with Softbank, Oracle and investment firm MGX with a goal to to invest up to $500 billion by 2029 in AI-specific data centers across the U.S

When asked whether scaling laws still hold, Altman said they “absolutely” do

He pointed to better models, smarter architectures, higher-quality data, and significantly more computing power as the path to “order-of-magnitude” imvements still ahead

But that kind of gress comes at a cost. “It’s going to take an eyewatering amount of compute,” he admitted. “But we intend to continue doing it.” Current confidence, but challenges ahead OpenAI has roughly doubled its revenue in the first seven months of 2025, hitting an annualized run rate of $12 billion—up from $6 billion at the start of the year, according to a recent report by The Information

And earlier this week OpenAI released a free, open-source model—an unusual move for a company often criticized for its closed apach over the past half-decade—suggesting confidence that its premium offering, which is now GPT-5, will continue to dominate

There are plenty of challenges ahead, however

OpenAI is also navigating an effort to turn its commercial arm into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) while ensuring its original nonfit maintains control

There has been significant legal and public backlash to its efforts, including a lawsuit from co-founder Elon Musk and scrutiny from state attorneys general in California and Delaware

In addition, OpenAI faces broader regulatory attention as it rethinks its governance structure—raising questions charitable asset tection, public benefit accountability, and compliance with state nonfit laws

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