OpenAI has launched its GPT-5.2 model, pushing forward again in the competition that has become stronger since Google released Gemini 3 last month.
This follows reports that CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” inside the company in early December, halting side projects and pulling teams into a faster development sprint.
The urgency was linked to Google’s latest innovations, which had placed Gemini 3 at the top of key performance rankings across reasoning, coding and multimodal tasks.
OpenAI says GPT-5.2 brings stronger general intelligence, better coding results, and far longer context handling. The company believes these improvements will help users complete more demanding work, particularly tasks that involve spreadsheets, complex documents, and project-heavy workflows.
Interestingly, the new model stretches to handle up to a million tokens, a big difference from the previous model.
Google has been keen to highlight what Gemini 3 is capable of across text, audio, images and video, and analysts say its tight integration with Workspace and Android gives it an advantage with corporate users.
Even with that, Altman played down the internal panic when he spoke on CNBC, saying: “Gemini 3 has had less of an impact on our metrics than we feared.” Google has not responded to requests for comment.
OpenAI is rolling out GPT-5.2 in three versions: Instant for quick responses, Thinking for slower but more reasoned answers, and Pro for enterprise-level performance. Paid ChatGPT users will receive them first. The company also states it will continue to support GPT-5.1, GPT-5 and GPT-4.1 on its API, giving developers more flexibility.
Away from the technical competition, OpenAI is also moving into entertainment. Disney has confirmed a $1 billion investment in the company and will allow its Sora video generator to use characters and worlds from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel.
This is one of the largest licensing deals yet between Hollywood and an AI firm, and it sets up OpenAI as a direct partner in digital content production. Microsoft, still OpenAI’s biggest backer with about $13 billion committed since 2019, continues to host the company’s models on Azure.
Industry forecasts show spending on cloud-based AI services is expected to rise sharply, with Gartner estimating it will exceed $723 billion next year. Many companies are already relying on GPT models for coding assistance, document processing and data insights. According to OpenAI, enterprise usage has climbed roughly 40% in the past year.
However, regulators in the US and Europe are examining safety standards, competition risks and copyright issues, with Disney’s licensing deal likely to draw even closer attention.
