GPT-5 Pro vs GPT-3.5 Turbo

1. Highest reasoning quality in the GPT-5 family

• Uses significantly more compute to "think harder" before responding.
• Designed for the toughest reasoning tasks where answer quality matters more than speed.
• Produces more precise, reliable, and detailed outputs than standard GPT-5.

2. Advanced multi-turn reasoning via Responses API

• Available only in the Responses API to support:
  • Multi-turn internal model interactions before returning a reply.
  • Advanced control patterns (e.g., background mode for long-running jobs).
• Ideal for complex workflows, deep planning, and multi-step analysis.

3. Configured for maximum effort by default

• Always runs with reasoning.effort: 'high' (no lower-effort mode).
• Prioritizes depth and correctness over latency and cost.

4. Multimodal input

• Accepts text + image as input.
• Outputs text, with strong instruction-following and analysis capabilities.

5. Tooling and ecosystem integration

• Supports Web Search, File Search, and Image Generation (as tools).
• Supports MCP and other Responses API tooling patterns.
• Does not support Code Interpreter and does not support Computer Use, keeping focus on pure reasoning + tools.

1. Extremely low-cost text model

• One of the cheapest legacy models available.
• Suitable for very high-volume workloads with simple requirements.

2. Good for lightweight NLP tasks

• Classification, summarization, rewriting, paraphrasing, intent detection.
• Works for simple logic tasks and short reasoning sequences.

3. Works well for basic chatbots

• Optimized for Chat Completions API, originally powering early ChatGPT use cases.
• Good for rule-based or templated conversation flows.

4. Stable and predictable outputs

• Legacy behavior makes it suitable for systems built years ago that rely on its quirks.
• Good for backward compatibility or long-term enterprise pipelines.

5. Supports fine-tuning

• Useful for teams maintaining older fine-tuned GPT-3.5 models.
• Allows domain-specific compression of older datasets.

6. Limited capabilities compared to newer models

• No vision, no audio, no streaming, and no function calling.
• Much weaker reasoning and correctness vs GPT-4o mini or GPT-5.1.

7. Small context window (16K)

• Limited for multi-document tasks or long conversations.
• Best used for short, simple prompts or structured tasks.

8. Recommended migration path

• OpenAI explicitly recommends using GPT-4o mini instead.
• 4o mini is cheaper, smarter, faster, multimodal, and far more capable.