o1-pro vs GPT-3.5 Turbo

1. Maximum-compute o-series model

• Uses significantly more compute per query compared to o1.
• Produces deeper, more reliable reasoning chains.
• Best suited for high-stakes tasks that need correctness over speed.

2. Trained with reinforcement learning for deliberate thinking

• Explicit "think-before-answer" architecture.
• Excels at complex reasoning requiring multi-step analysis.

3. Very strong at math, science, coding, and technical proofs

• Handles long derivations, algorithm design, and difficult logic problems.
• Produces structured and explainable reasoning trails.

4. Great for multi-turn reasoning workflows

• Responses API optimized: can think over multiple internal turns before responding.
• Ideal for agentic reasoning pipelines.

5. Large context window

• 200,000-token context for large documents, multi-file review, and long reasoning traces.

6. Multimodal input (text + image)

• Can analyze images for mathematical diagrams, charts, handwritten content, UI layouts, etc.
• Output is text only.

7. Consistency, reliability, and depth

• Designed for situations where accuracy matters more than latency or cost.
• Strong error-checking and self-correction abilities.

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.