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Visual Studio Gets GPT-5
Microsoft today announced OpenAI's latest and greatest frontier AI model is now available to the GitHub Copilot tool within the company's flagship Visual Studio IDE, just days after it was released.
OpenAI last Thursday began the gradual rollout of GPT-5, the company's new flagship large language model, to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers worldwide.
The company describes GPT-5 as a unified, auto-switching system that integrates the capabilities of prior models into a smart, fast model. GPT-5 introduces a deeper reasoning mode called GPT-5 Thinking, which engages automatically for more complex requests. As OpenAI explained, GPT-5 "can 'think' more deeply when a problem benefits from careful analysis, especially for complex work like coding, science questions, information synthesis, and data or financial analysis." With GPT-5, users do not need to choose the "right" model for their tasks, as ChatGPT "automatically adapts to the task, delivering faster, higher-quality, and more reliable results." The model uses a real-time router that decides which mode to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and user intent.
Key features include:
- Unified System: GPT-5 automatically decides whether to use its Chat or Thinking mode for a given request. Users on paid plans can also manually select GPT-5 or GPT-5 Thinking.
- Professional Output: The model generates professional, long-form documents and reports that are structured and polished.
- Data Synthesis: GPT-5 can integrate insights from multiple uploaded reports, datasets, or connected apps, such as Google Drive, to provide evidence-based recommendations.
- Tool Compatibility: The model works with all existing ChatGPT tools without limitation, including web search, data analysis, image analysis, file analysis, image generation, Memory, and Custom Instructions.
"GPT-5 offers faster responses and even better performance for writing and understanding code," Microsoft said in an Aug. 12 blog post. "This release brings a new level of capability to your development workflow, making it easier to move from idea to implementation."
Microsoft said the new model offers these improvements:
- Reasoning and decision-making for complex coding tasks
- Code quality and maintainability, even for large implementations with minimal prompting
- Clarity of explanations, giving you a better understanding of the changes it makes
"GPT-5 is rolling out to all paid Copilot plans starting today," Microsoft said. "You can access it in both Agent Mode and Ask Mode. If you do not yet see GPT-5 in your model picker, check back soon as rollout continues."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.