GPT-5.1 vs GPT-3.5 Turbo

1. Configurable Reasoning for Agentic Tasks

• Built to excel in autonomous or semi-autonomous coding workflows, with adjustable reasoning effort for planning, refactoring and debugging.

2. Fast Multi-Modal Input with Large Output

• Accepts both text and image inputs while producing text outputs.
• Offers up to 128 k output tokens, allowing long responses and code generation across multiple files.

3. Large Context & Knowledge Cut-Off

• 400 k token context window supports processing large codebases or documents.
• Knowledge cut-off of Sep 30 2024 ensures familiarity with recent tools and frameworks.

4. Reasoning Token Support

• Provides explicit support for reasoning tokens, enabling developers to fine-tune the balance between reasoning depth and speed.

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.