5 Ways OpenAI’s GPT-5 Is Supercharging ChatGPT for Users

OpenAI’s latest rollout of GPT-5 as the default artificial intelligence (AI) model for ChatGPT brings with it several new capabilities that can power up productivity for business and personal users.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet for the busy business user:

All-in-One Chatting and Reasoning Model

GPT-5 transforms ChatGPT into an AI model that can automatically switch between doing quick search and research tasks or dive into reasoning mode, which typically takes longer to generate a response.

“GPT-5 will automatically decide to use reasoning or not. Switching should be smoother in the next update,” said Elaine Ya Le, a researcher at OpenAI, during a recent Q&A by OpenAI’s team with users on Reddit.

To force ChatGPT to go into “thinking” mode instead of waiting for it to switch, Ya Le said to prompt it: “You can add ‘think hard’ to your prompt to simply trigger reasoning mode.”

Before GPT-5, ChatGPT users could choose between GPT models and the “o” reasoning series of models. GPT-5 merges both capabilities.

Usage Allowance Doubles for Plus Users

ChatGPT Plus subscribers can send up to 160 messages using GPT-5 every three hours. That’s twice as many as prior models, according to OpenAI’s community forums.

“We are going to double rate limits for Plus users as we finish rollout,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed during the Q&A with Redditors.

The more expensive Team and Pro plans get unlimited usage with GPT-5, unless this privilege is abused such as sharing the account with other users. For older AI models, Team accounts faced usage caps.

For GPT-5 Thinking, Plus users are capped at 200 messages per week if they manually select this option. When ChatGPT switches to “Thinking” mode by itself, this does not count toward the quota.

Eric Mitchell from OpenAI’s research team told Redditors that OpenAI “definitely” intends Plus users to have “unlimited access to reasoning.”

For the free tier, GPT-5 gives users 10 messages every five hours. Previously they were capped at an unspecified “limited” number of messages every five hours under GPT-4o.

Free users also get one GPT-5 Thinking message per day.

No More Access to 7 AI Models

With the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI is discontinuing immediate access to the following AI models that used to be options in ChatGPT:

GPT-4.1

GPT-4.5

GPT-4.1 mini

o4-mini

o4-mini-high

o3

o3-pro

Free users will see this change immediately. Paying users can restore access by adjusting the settings on the web version of ChatGPT.

Supports All Tools Available in ChatGPT

Users don’t have to toggle tools on or off with GPT-5. They are automatically enabled depending on what the user needs.

Tools include web search, data analysis, image analysis, file analysis, canvas, image generation, memory and custom instructions.

For example, when a user tells ChatGPT to analyze a spreadsheet, it will use the data analysis tool. In prior models, the user needed to prompt ChatGPT to “draw a picture” to trigger the image generation tool. While GPT-4o’s “agent mode” let the AI act proactively, GPT-5 is more streamlined, according to the startup.

Asked on Reddit whether ChatGPT will one day allow third-party plugins inside the integrated development environment (IDE), Daniel Levine from OpenAI’s product team responded: “Yes, this is very much our goal. We want ChatGPT to help you build software with external tools.”

New Voice Mode Better at Following Instructions

There are two ways to use “voice” mode: clicking on the microphone icon in the prompt window and speaking a prompt or query for ChatGPT to process; and activating full “voice” mode and interacting directly with the model.

Sulman Choudhry, head of engineering at OpenAI, said voice mode is now better at following instructions with GPT-5.

“ChatGPT is doing more and more economically valuable work for our users,” Choudhry told Redditors. “We launched a new voice model that is better at instruction following and will keep making it better.”

All free users will also get access to advanced voice mode, according to Choudhry.

Overall, Mitchell told Redditors that users should get more advanced capabilities with GPT-5: “GPT-5 is a huge improvement over GPT-4 in a few key areas: It thinks better (reasoning), writes better (creativity), follows instructions more closely and is more aligned to user intent.”

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