Alice
The AI industry’s breakneck pace of innovation has become nearly impossible to keep up with. Just days after the launches of Grok 4.1 and Gemini 3 Pro, OpenAI has quietly unveiled GPT-5.1 Pro—with no dedicated blog post, just a two-sentence official announcement.
As widely known, the GPT-5.1 series emphasizes both “emotional and intellectual intelligence,” and the Pro variant takes these dual strengths to new heights. According to early testers, GPT-5.1 Pro delivers significantly more insightful and accessible responses than its predecessor, with third-party evaluations from Epoch AI showing its capability index matching that of GPT-5 in high-inference mode. Human immunologist Derya Unutmaz noted it “explains complex concepts with greater clarity while retaining depth,” making specialized knowledge more approachable for non-experts.
On the same day, OpenAI launched its flagship coding model, GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, on the Codex platform. As its name suggests, the model builds on GPT-5.1 and undergoes specialized training for agent tasks in software development, engineering, mathematics, and research. This specialization translates to enhanced capabilities, faster response times, and 30% more token efficiency compared to previous versions.
Designed explicitly for “long-duration, high-intensity” development tasks, GPT-5.1-Codex-Max can operate autonomously for over 24 hours straight, processing millions of tokens to deliver complete, usable outputs. Its performance validates the enduring relevance of Scaling Law, as OpenAI’s first model with native “compaction” technology—an innovative mechanism that retains critical context while discarding irrelevant details when approaching window limits. This breakthrough enables it to handle complex tasks like project refactoring, in-depth debugging, and multi-hour agent loops seamlessly.
In benchmark testing, the coding model outperformed key rivals: it scored 77.9% on SWE-Bench Verified (vs. Gemini 3 Pro’s 76.2%), 58.1% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 (vs. 54.2% for Gemini 3 Pro), and matched Gemini 3 Pro’s 2439 points on LiveCodeBench Pro. OpenAI’s internal data shows 95% of its engineers use Codex tools weekly, with pull request submissions rising 70% since adoption—a trend expected to accelerate with the new model.
Availability is already underway: GPT-5.1 Pro is now accessible to all Pro subscribers, while GPT-5.1-Codex-Max integrates with Codex’s CLI, IDE extensions, cloud services, and code review tools. An API for the coding model is slated to launch soon.
As 2025 draws to a close, the ultimate AI showdown looms. With GPT-5.1 Pro excelling at deep reasoning tasks and Codex-Max leading in coding benchmarks, all eyes are on whether OpenAI’s latest releases can outpace Google’s Gemini 3 Pro in the battle for AI supremacy.
