5 Major Differences Between GPT-4 and GPT-5 You Should Know

OpenAI has officially released GPT-5, marking a major milestone in the GPT-4 vs GPT-5 debate. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, calls it a critical step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).
This isn’t just a minor performance tweak — GPT-5 brings stronger reasoning, far fewer hallucinations, and vastly improved multimodal capabilities. Now, the default across all ChatGPT tiers — Free, Plus, Pro, and Team — makes advanced AI more accessible than ever.
1. Smarter Reasoning & Reduced Hallucinations
GPT‑5 introduces a real-time router system, switching between a fast model for simple tasks and a deep reasoning model when needed.
Benchmarks show:
- ~45% reduction in factual errors versus GPT‑4o.
- “Thinking” mode slashes hallucinations by ~80% on open-ended tasks.
2. Vastly Expanded Context Length
Context-handling is a big leap:
- GPT‑4 maxed out at around 32K tokens.
- GPT‑5 supports up to 400K tokens total—272K input, 128K output—allowing it to understand entire books or lengthy documents in one go, financially.
On the long-context benchmark, GPT‑5 achieves 89% accuracy at 128K–256K tokens.
3. Superior Multimodal & Agentic Abilities
GPT‑5 isn’t just better with text:
- Excels in coding, health queries, and image-based tasks.
- Outperforms previous models on benchmarks like AIME (math), SWE-bench (coding), MMMU (vision), and HealthBench OpenAI+1.
- It routes between general and expert models based on task need, a unique AI orchestration system.
4. Smarter Personalization & Usage Modes
GPT‑5 offers:
- A unified, auto-switching AI system—no need to manually change models.
- Versions that suit different needs—standard, mini, nano—with mini handling overflow when usage caps are reached.
5. Global Access & Availability
GPT‑5 is now available worldwide, including India, across free and paid ChatGPT tiers.
India plays a key role in OpenAI’s strategy:
- OpenAI CEO praised India’s rapid AI adoption and growth as a critical market.
- GPT‑5 offers support for multiple Indian languages and is designed to be highly accessible and affordable for Indian users.
Comparison Table: GPT-4 vs GPT-5
Feature | GPT-4 / GPT-4o | GPT-5 |
---|---|---|
Reasoning & Accuracy | Strong, but higher hallucination risk | Deep thinking branch, 45–80% fewer hallucinations |
Context Window | Up to 32K tokens | Up to 400K tokens total |
Multimodal Skills | Basic image/text understanding | Advanced coding, health, vision capabilities |
Personalization | Manual model selection | Auto-switching system, multiple versions |
Global Access | Limited tiers/platforms | Available globally across all tiers |
Also read: OpenAI’s Next Model GPT-5 Is Almost Here — But Temper Your Expectations
Future Outlook
GPT‑5 is a leap in AI capability, moving us closer to AGI. We can anticipate:
- Richer real-time tool integration with apps and services.
- Improved energy-efficient design, though concerns remain about higher energy usage with more complex models.
- Growing use of Indian language models and localized AI applications, powered by GPT-5’s advanced multilingual strengths.
FAQ
Conclusion
The difference between GPT-4 and GPT-5 is more than incremental—it’s transformational. GPT-5’s smarter reasoning, massive context handling, seamless multimodal use, and global accessibility position it as the new standard. The AI future is here, especially for Indian users who now have powerful tools at their fingertips.