Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
GPT-5.2 Instant is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 85 to 80. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
GPT-5.2 Instant's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 75.5 against 66.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HLE, 43 to 27.
GPT-5.1 gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for GPT-5.2 Instant.
Pick GPT-5.2 Instant if you want the stronger benchmark profile. GPT-5.1 only becomes the better choice if you need the larger 200K context window.
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.6
GPT-5.1
75.8
GPT-5.2 Instant
75.5
GPT-5.1
66.2
GPT-5.2 Instant
93.1
GPT-5.1
91.8
GPT-5.2 Instant
90.9
GPT-5.1
88.4
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.8
GPT-5.1
72.5
GPT-5.2 Instant
95
GPT-5.1
89
GPT-5.2 Instant
94.4
GPT-5.1
87.7
GPT-5.2 Instant
97.2
GPT-5.1
95.4
GPT-5.2 Instant is ahead overall, 85 to 80. The biggest single separator in this matchup is HLE, where the scores are 43 and 27.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.8 versus 72.5. Inside this category, HLE is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 75.5 versus 66.2. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 97.2 versus 95.4. Inside this category, MATH-500 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 90.9 versus 88.4. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.6 versus 75.8. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 93.1 versus 91.8. Inside this category, OfficeQA Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 95 versus 89. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 94.4 versus 87.7. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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