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OpenAI Launches GPT-5.1 With Instant and Thinking Models, New Personalization Controls

The rollout prioritizes paid tiers, with legacy GPT‑5 access retained for three months.

Overview

  • GPT-5.1 debuts in two variants: Instant focuses on warmer, more instruction-following conversation, while Thinking targets complex tasks with clearer answers and variable pacing.
  • Both models introduce adaptive reasoning that adjusts thinking time to query difficulty, with OpenAI reporting gains on AIME 2025 and Codeforces benchmarks.
  • OpenAI is phasing access to Pro, Plus, Go, and Business users first, Enterprise and Education receive a seven-day early-access toggle, and API availability is slated for later this week.
  • ChatGPT adds expanded personality presets including Professional, Candid, and Quirky, plus new controls to tune conciseness, warmth, scannability, and emoji frequency, with a style fine-tuning experiment in settings.
  • OpenAI’s system card notes slight regressions on several internal safety tests for GPT-5.1 versus GPT-5, and charts indicate the Thinking model may use substantially more tokens on the toughest queries.