ChatGPT is about to get a whole lot better. OpenAI has finally taken the wraps off of GPT-5, its latest and greatest large language model. GPT-5 has been rumored and speculated about for as long as GPT-4 has been around, and for good reason. The new foundational OpenAI model packs a ton of improvements that will make ChatGPT more accurate, more customizable, and more helpful.

For starters, GPT-5 is smarter, faster, and more accurate — which, yes, means fewer “hallucinations,” which occur when ChatGPT makes up information. As one OpenAI leader described it during the announcement livestream, it's like having a subject matter expert on anything in your pocket. GPT-5 is also being positioned as a model that can do everything. It can write, code, create interactive apps, check your email, and conduct deep research.

Curious about what's on offer in GPT-5 and whether or not it will actually improve the ChatGPT experience? Like the rest of the world, we're still investigating GPT-5 for ourselves. In the meantime, here are all the best new features to try with GPT-5, which rolls out today for free to all ChatGPT users.

The integrated ChatGPT experience

GPT-5 integrates all of the various models on offer by ChatGPT. That means instead of picking the right model for the task at hand, ChatGPT will pick the best model(s) for your prompt.

Simply ask GPT-5, and it will decide how to approach a problem on its own.

Credit: OpenAI

OpenAI is introducing additional models along with GPT-5, which is the do-it-all model that will be OpenAI’s flagship model going forward. There’s also GPT-5 Mini and GPT-5 Nano, which are more cost-effective than GPT-5, and will be accessible to developers who want to pay less. Users will automatically transition to using these smaller models when they hit their GPT-5 usage limits; however, OpenAI says they’re still very capable models — and even more capable than GPT-o3 in many cases.

Your own personal coder

OpenAI is positioning GPT-5 as being your own personal coder, and the company says GPT-5 is significantly better at writing code. If you're a programmer, then OpenAI wants GPT-5 to be your new coding partner. But what about the rest of us? The so-called vibe coders of the world?

During a live demo, company leaders showed how to use GPT-5 to create custom, interactive applications on demand using a simple prompt. So, you could think of an app or a piece of software that you wish you had, and simply ask ChatGPT to make it.

Of course, in the real world GPT-5 probably won’t be quite as seamless as that — it’s still likely to make errors, and won’t get everything right the first time. But if you’re interested in so-called “vibe-coding,” GPT-5 looks like a big leap forward.

Try deep research and reasoning

Because GPT-5 integrates all of OpenAI's models into one AI chatbot — and because it's free to all ChatGPT users — free users can finally gain access to OpenAI's most advanced reasoning models. Reasoning models can conduct multi-part searches based on your prompt, then synthesize vast amounts of data into a response. And according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, GPT-5 can do this at a PhD level.

We haven't tested this out for ourselves yet, and we're always nervous about hallucinations. However, if you only use the free ChatGPT tier, then this kind of deep research is definitely worth trying. But GPT-5 doesn't just do research. During the livestream, OpenAI leaders showed how GPT-5 could create custom visualizations, interactive apps, games, quizzes, and other tools to help you learn about the subject at hand.

Personalities

OpenAI is also debuting four new preset personalities in ChatGPT. These can inform how ChatGPT will interact with you as you chat and are set on a chat-by-chat basis. Initially, there will be four options:

• Cynic

• Robot

• Listener

• Nerd

You don't actually have to use any of these personalities if you don't want to, but you can use them for specific use cases as needed. You can also adjust them in ChatGPT settings. OpenAI says the new personalities were specifically designed to reduce the sycophancy issue with GPT-4o.

Better voice mode

Voice Mode makes it easy to get information from ChatGPT without having to type every single word. With GPT-5, Voice Mode is getting better, OpenAI says. The company says Voice Mode will now adapt and better understand your instructions so that it can tailor how it speaks depending on the moment. All users will have access to this improved ChatGPT Voice Mode, including free users, though of course paid users will have higher usage limits.

OpenAI is also making Voice Mode more accessible, and it will now be available in custom GPTs. The lack of advanced voice mode in custom GPTs has been sorely missing, so this update will be super helpful for those who use custom GPTs for different tasks.

Connect your Gmail and Google Calendar

The ability to connect ChatGPT to external apps like Google Drive has been helpful for those who want their AI assistant to be able to reference information in their Google account. Now, those connections are getting much more helpful.

You'll be able to enable Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts connections with ChatGPT, and going forward, ChatGPT will automatically pull information from them and reference them as necessary. That means that you won't have to explicitly select the connections in a chat each time. For some, of course, this might raise privacy concerns, but rest assured, you don't have to connect these apps or services if you don't want to.

At launch, you might not be able to connect them anyway. Initially, this feature will only be available to Pro users and will start rolling out next week. Other tiers will get it too, but we don't know exactly when.

Customize your chats

Apart from simply being underpinned by a better model, GPT-5 also heralds a few new features for ChatGPT that can even further enhance the experience of using it. An example of that is the fact that you can now choose colors for different chats. That may sound like a small update (and to be clear, it is), but this feature could help you much better organize your chats and more easily jump between them.

What features did we not get?

OpenAI says GPT-5 can write better, code better, and even better inform users on issues around health. (To be clear, you should still consult with a medical professional before you make any health-related decisions. ChatGPT does not replace your doctor.)

But there are some ways in which GPT-5 is not better than existing OpenAI large language models. For example, it has a wider context window than GPT-4o at 256,000 tokens, but that's still nowhere near as impressive as GPT-4.1, which has a one-million-token context window. Thankfully, OpenAI says it will continue to support GPT-4.1, which might be a better model for those times in which you need ChatGPT to process massive amounts of information at a time.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Vicky

OpenAI just announced GPT-5, its newest AI model that comes complete with better coding abilities, larger context windows, improved video generation with Sora, improved memory, and more features. One of the improvements the company is spotlighting? Upgrades that, according to OpenAI, will vastly improve the quality of health advice offered through ChatGPT.

"GPT‑5 is our best model yet for health-related questions, empowering users to be informed about and advocate for their health," an OpenAI blog post about GPT-5 reads.

The company wrote that GPT-5 is "a significant leap in intelligence over all our previous models, featuring state-of-the-art performance" in health. The blog post said this new model "scores significantly higher than any previous model on HealthBench⁠, an evaluation we published earlier this year based on realistic scenarios and physician-defined criteria."

OpenAI said that this model acts more as an "active thought partner" than a doctor which, to be clear, it is not. The company argues that this model also "provides more precise and reliable responses, adapting to the user’s context, knowledge level, and geography, enabling it to provide safer and more helpful responses in a wide range of scenarios."

But OpenAI didn't focus on these during its livestream — instead, when it came time to dig into what makes GPT-5 different from previous models with relation to health during the livestream, it focused on its improvement in speed.

It should be clear that ChatGPT is not a medical professional. While patients are turning to ChatGPT in droves, ChatGPT is not HIPAA compliant, meaning your data isn't as safe with a chatbot as it is with a doctor, and more studies need to be done with regards to its efficacy.

Beyond physical health, OpenAI has faced a host of issues related to mental health and safety of its users. In a blog post last week, the company said it would be working to foster healthier, more stable relationships between the chatbot and people using it. ChatGPT-5 will nudge users who have spent too long with the bot, it will work to fix the bot's sycophancy problems, and it is working to be better at recognizing mental and emotional distress among its users.

"We don’t always get it right. Earlier this year, an update made the model too agreeable, sometimes saying what sounded nice instead of what was actually helpful. We rolled it back, changed how we use feedback, and are improving how we measure real-world usefulness over the long term, not just whether you liked the answer in the moment," OpenAI wrote in the announcement. "We also know that AI can feel more responsive and personal than prior technologies, especially for vulnerable individuals experiencing mental or emotional distress."

Vicky

GPT-5 has some added benefits for those who live in Google's digital ecosystem.

Put simply, you can link up your Gmail and Google Calendar accounts to ChatGPT now, which will let the chatbot use the information therein to help you out when needed. In the GPT-5 announcement livestream on Wednesday, OpenAI dedicated a short live segment to this in which the demonstrator used ChatGPT to help plan out her day after linking her accounts together.

Nifty.
Credit: Screenshot: OpenAI

If you ask ChatGPT to give you an outline of your day, it'll use the information in your inbox and calendar to give you a little brief on what to expect. It will build a schedule for you and even let you know if you have important emails you haven't responded to yet. It's not clear yet what this feature does beyond all of that, though even that will certainly be useful to some people.

There are, of course, privacy concerns here. Some of us have been using Gmail for a decade or more, meaning a lot of personal info can be hidden in there. Giving over access of that to a chatbot that vacuums up data by design might be a bridge too far for some users.

GPT-5 rolls out today, but as of this writing, it's not yet online.

Vicky