Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
GPT-5.2 Instant finishes one point ahead overall, 85 to 84. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.
GPT-5.2 Instant's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 79.6 against 76.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MRCRv2, 84 to 89. Grok 4.1 does hit back in reasoning, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Grok 4.1 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $1.50 input / $6.00 output per 1M tokens for GPT-5.2 Instant. That is roughly 2.5x on output cost alone. GPT-5.2 Instant is the reasoning model in the pair, while Grok 4.1 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. Grok 4.1 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 128K for GPT-5.2 Instant.
Pick GPT-5.2 Instant if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Grok 4.1 only becomes the better choice if reasoning is the priority or you need the larger 1M context window.
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.6
Grok 4.1
76.9
GPT-5.2 Instant
75.5
Grok 4.1
73.4
GPT-5.2 Instant
93.1
Grok 4.1
93.2
GPT-5.2 Instant
90.9
Grok 4.1
91.9
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.8
Grok 4.1
79.5
GPT-5.2 Instant
95
Grok 4.1
93
GPT-5.2 Instant
94.4
Grok 4.1
92.8
GPT-5.2 Instant
97.2
Grok 4.1
96.8
GPT-5.2 Instant is ahead overall, 85 to 84. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MRCRv2, where the scores are 84 and 89.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.8 versus 79.5. 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 73.4. Inside this category, HumanEval 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 96.8. Inside this category, MATH-500 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Grok 4.1 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 91.9 versus 90.9. Inside this category, MRCRv2 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 76.9. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Grok 4.1 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 93.2 versus 93.1. Inside this category, MMMU-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 93. 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 92.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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