OpenAI on Thursday launched its latest AI mannequin, GPT-5.5, to its paid subscribers.
The discharge, coming simply six weeks after the corporate debuted GPT-5.4, is an especially quick turnaround that underscores how fiercely frontier AI labs are competing for enterprise clients, and the way their fashions are more and more evolving via steady, incremental updates.
The corporate additionally stated there are 4 million energetic Codex customers and 9 million paying enterprise customers on ChatGPT. ChatGPT additionally has greater than 900 million weekly energetic customers and over 50 million subscribers. It little question hopes these figures will undercut a story that has been constructing throughout social media that OpenAI has misplaced traction amongst customers and has fallen behind its arch-rival Anthropic within the race for enterprise clients.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman referred to as the brand new mannequin a “new class of intelligence” and “a big step towards more agentic and intuitive computing” throughout a press briefing. He acknowledged that “there are enough model releases that it’s probably getting hard to distinguish one from another,” however stated GPT-5.5 can do extra with much less steering and is “way more intuitive to use—it can look at an unclear problem and figure out what needs to happen next.”
These capabilities, he added, “feel like they’re setting the foundation for how we’re going to do computer work going forward, or how agent computing at scale will work,” notably in areas like scientific analysis which can be “very intelligence bottlenecked.” He pointed to an instance of a math professor who used GPT-5.5 and Codex to construct an algebraic geometry app from a single immediate in 11 minutes.
Brockman additionally emphasised effectivity beneficial properties. “It’s a faster, sharper thinker for fewer tokens compared to something like 5.4,” he stated, including that this implies “more frontier AI available for businesses and for consumers.” Tokens are the fundamental models of information that enormous language fashions course of and the premise on which AI corporations cost many enterprise clients. In textual content, a token is about equal to a phrase and a half.
The Financial institution of New York has been testing GPT-5.5 in current weeks, alongside early entry to fashions from rivals like Anthropic. CIO Leigh-Ann Russell stated the enhancements are significant.
“What we’re actually seeing from 5.5, that I think is really important for a highly regulated institution, is the response quality—but also a really impressive hallucination resistance,” she stated. “A bank needs to have very high accuracy, so this becomes critical, and we are seeing a step change with this model.”
Something within the financial institution that has higher accuracy will assist with scaling the corporate’s over 220 AI use instances, she added. “We see resiliency as being commercial. So the more quickly we can just establish that accuracy, the faster we can scale our models to have completely redesigned financial services.”
In 2001, Fortune first convened “The Smartest People We Know,” bringing collectively CEOs and founders, builders and buyers, thinkers and doers. Since then, Fortune Brainstorm Tech has been the place the place daring concepts collide. From June 8–10, we’ll return to Aspen—the place all of it started—to mark 25 years of Brainstorm. Register now.
