The race to be state-of-the-art continues to intensify among the frontier AI labs.
On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.4, the latest edition to its flagship model series, calling the model its “most capable and efficient frontier model for professional work.” Along with making the model available in ChatGPT (labeled "GPT-5.4 Thinking" or "Thinking 5.4" in the chatbot), the API and Codex, OpenAI also released GPT‑5.4 Pro for “maximum performance” on complex tasks.
The model combines the best of OpenAI’s advances in reasoning, coding and agentic control into a single model, the company said, delivering consistent, more refined results on real-world tasks.
Some of the updates include:
- The ability to adjust coarse mid-response and provide upfront plans of its thinking for improved deep web research and better context maintenance
- State-of-the-art computer-use capabilities that allow agents to carry out complex workflows and support up to 1 million tokens of context
- Tool searching, enabling agents to find and connect with the tools they need more quickly without sacrificing intelligence
- And improved token efficiency, allowing it to use “significantly fewer tokens” to solve problems faster
“The result is a model that gets complex real work done accurately, effectively, and efficiently—delivering what you asked for with less back and forth,” OpenAI said in its announcement.
OpenAI is pointedly targeting professionals with this update as its battle with enterprise AI rival Anthropic continues to heat up. And in advance of this release, OpenAI let some enterprises test the new models.
Brendan Foody, CEO of Mercor, said in a post on X that the model is the best the company has ever tested on APEX-Agents, its benchmark for testing whether agents can execute long-horizon tasks. Foody stated that ChatGPT “will imminently be better than the best consulting firm, better than the best investment bank, and better than the best law firm.”
Data management firm Box, meanwhile, tested the model’s extraction capabilities, or its ability to pull out multiple metadata fields from dense documents in a single pass, and found that the model’s accuracy increased 6 percentage points to 78%, up from 72% accuracy that GPT-5.2 exhibited. Yashodha Bhavnani, head of AI at Box, told The Deep View that this represents “a critical capability to drive and inform enterprise workflows.”
Our Deeper View
With the rising buzz around its rival Anthropic escalating to new heights in recent weeks, it makes sense that OpenAI is zeroed in on enterprises for this release. Downloads of Anthropic’s Claude have skyrocketed as the firm garners goodwill from its users amid its fight with the US government. Plus, Anthropic is now closing the gap with OpenAI in revenue, revealing an ARR of $19 billion to OpenAI’s $25 billion. Given that Anthropic’s main audience is professionals, OpenAI wants to capture some of that attention by showing users that its models are ready to take on more agentic workflows and automate tasks for professionals. That's likely to become what GPT-5.4 is most known for.