On Wednesday, OpenAI released GPT-5.1 Fast and GPT-5.1 Pondering, two updated versions of its flagship AI models now available in ChatGPT. The corporate is wrapping the models within the language of anthropomorphism, claiming that they’re warmer, more conversational, and higher at following instructions.
The discharge follows complaints earlier this 12 months that its previous models were excessively cheerful and sycophantic, together with an opposing controversy amongst users over how OpenAI modified the default GPT-5 output style after several suicide lawsuits.
The corporate now faces intense scrutiny from lawyers and regulators that would threaten its future operations. In that form of environment, it’s difficult to only release a brand new AI model, throw out a number of stats, and move on like the corporate could even a 12 months ago. But listed below are the fundamentals: The brand new GPT-5.1 Fast model will function ChatGPT’s faster default option for many tasks, while GPT-5.1 Pondering is a simulated reasoning model that attempts to handle more complex problem-solving tasks.
OpenAI claims that each models perform higher on technical benchmarks resembling math and coding evaluations (including AIME 2025 and Codeforces) than GPT-5, which was released in August.
Improved benchmarks may win over some users, but the most important change with GPT-5.1 is in its presentation. OpenAI says it heard from users that they wanted AI models to simulate different communication styles depending on the duty, so the corporate is offering eight preset options, including Skilled, Friendly, Candid, Quirky, Efficient, Cynical, and Nerdy, alongside a Default setting.
These presets alter the instructions fed into each prompt to simulate different personality styles, however the underlying model capabilities remain the identical across all settings.
As well as, the corporate trained GPT-5.1 Fast to make use of “adaptive reasoning,” meaning that the model decides when to spend more computational time processing a prompt before generating output.
The corporate plans to roll out the models step by step over the following few days, starting with paid subscribers before expanding to free users. OpenAI plans to bring each GPT-5.1 Fast and GPT-5.1 Pondering to its API later this week. GPT-5.1 Fast will appear as gpt-5.1-chat-latest, and GPT-5.1 Pondering can be released as GPT-5.1 within the API, each with adaptive reasoning enabled. The older GPT-5 models will remain available in ChatGPT under the legacy models dropdown for paid subscribers for 3 months.