Nathaniel Whittemore

Ethan Mollick explored similar themes, calling this a sign of the future.

He writes, I had early access to 5.5 and I think it's a big deal.

It is a big deal because it indicates that we are not done with the rapid improvement in AI.

It is also a big deal because it is just plain good.

And it is a big deal because even with all of this, the frontier of AI ability remains jagged.

Jumping ahead, he concludes, 5.5 shows us that the models keep getting smarter, the apps keep getting more capable, and the harnesses keep getting better, making them ever more effective at solving real problems.

A year ago, none of this was close, and with the latest releases, capability gains appear to be accelerating.

GPT-5.5 is clearly not the end of this process, but it is a noteworthy step along the way.

And all indications from the OpenAI team seem to be that more is on the way.

When asked by reporters whether the pace of model releases would increase going forward, OpenAI chief scientist Jacob Pachocki said, Yes, we expect quite rapid continued progress.

We see pretty significant improvements in the short term, extremely significant improvements in the medium term.

I would definitely expect that we will continue to see the pace of AI capabilities improvement to keep increasing.

I would say the last few years have been surprisingly slow.

Putting that even more clearly, President Greg Brockman said, What 5.5 represents is not an endpoint.

In many ways, it's a beginning point.

It's really a step towards the kind of models that we see coming over even just the upcoming months.

And I think that you should expect that we are going to have even larger improvements in the capability across a wide variety of these aspects of what the model can do.

So there you have it, friends.

That is the first look at GBT 5.5.

I expect that in the next couple of days, we will see people both finding more things that it does incredibly well, but we will also start to find all the different chinks in the armor and things that we hope get fixed in the future.