GPT-5 (medium) vs GPT-4o mini

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across knowledge, coding, math, and reasoning.

GPT-5 (medium) is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 82 to 43. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

GPT-5 (medium)'s sharpest advantage is in multilingual, where it averages 90 against 87. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU, 91 to 82. GPT-4o mini does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

GPT-5 (medium) is the reasoning model in the pair, while GPT-4o mini is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use.

Quick Verdict

Pick GPT-5 (medium) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. GPT-4o mini only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Knowledge

GPT-4o mini

GPT-5 (medium)

76.7

GPT-4o mini

82

91
MMLU
82
89
GPQA
-
87
SuperGPQA
-
85
OpenBookQA
-
81
MMLU-Pro
-
27
HLE
-

Coding

GPT-4o mini

GPT-5 (medium)

70

GPT-4o mini

87.2

83
HumanEval
87.2
67
SWE-bench Verified
-
60
LiveCodeBench
-

Mathematics

GPT-5 (medium)
93
AIME 2023
-
95
AIME 2024
-
94
AIME 2025
-
89
HMMT Feb 2023
-
91
HMMT Feb 2024
-
90
HMMT Feb 2025
-
92
BRUMO 2025
-
92
MATH-500
-

Reasoning

GPT-5 (medium)
87
SimpleQA
-
85
MuSR
-
92
BBH
-

Instruction Following

GPT-5 (medium)
88
IFEval
-

Multilingual

GPT-5 (medium)

GPT-5 (medium)

90

GPT-4o mini

87

90
MGSM
87

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, GPT-5 (medium) or GPT-4o mini?

GPT-5 (medium) is ahead overall, 82 to 43. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMLU, where the scores are 91 and 82.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, GPT-5 (medium) or GPT-4o mini?

GPT-4o mini has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 82 versus 76.7. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, GPT-5 (medium) or GPT-4o mini?

GPT-4o mini has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 87.2 versus 70. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, GPT-5 (medium) or GPT-4o mini?

GPT-5 (medium) has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 90 versus 87. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 9, 2026

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