OpenAI has launched GPT-5.1, an upgrade to its flagship GPT-5 model released earlier this year.
According to AZ News, the ChatGPT parent company revealed that with these new upgrades the are aiming to make the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot “smarter and more enjoyable to talk to.”
As per AI the Instant version is “warmer, more intelligent, and better at following your instructions” than its predecessor, while the Thinking model is “easier to understand and faster on simple tasks, and more persistent on complex ones.”
ChatGPT will automatically match user queries to the most suitable model, with the rollout beginning this week. The previous GPT-5 models will remain available for three months under the “legacy models” menu before being phased out.
Alongside the technical improvements, OpenAI announced an expansion of its personality presets, allowing users to choose from conversational tones including Default, Professional, Friendly, Candid, Quirky, Efficient, Nerdy, and Cynical.
The company is also testing a new fine-tuning experiment that lets users directly adjust ChatGPT’s conversational style through settings, a feature being gradually introduced to select users this week.
“With more than 800 million people using ChatGPT, we’re well past the point of one-size-fits-all,” Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of Applications, wrote in a Wednesday Substack post.
While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hyped up the announce of GPT-5 in August, the release failed the hype test. Many ChatGPT users were left unimpressed, particularly at the incremental improvements, and expressed frustration over OpenAI’s choice to make it the default model for ChatGPT. There was so much pressure that OpenAI decided it would bring back GPT-4o as an option, a day after the launch of GPT-5.
