What changed
GPT-5 ships with native tool use baked into the pre-training loop rather than fine-tuned on top. That single shift matters more than any benchmark number.
- Context: 256k tokens at GA, 1M in API preview
- Multimodal: video input now stable, not experimental
- Pricing: 40% cheaper per token than GPT-4o at launch
Who benefits first
Agents and retrieval pipelines that currently break on long contexts. If your app chunks documents because of limits, you can simplify that logic now.
Takeaway
The benchmark lead is real but temporary. The architecture changes — native tool use, cheaper long context — are the durable wins.