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 63. 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 38.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 74 to 34.
GPT-5.2 Instant is the reasoning model in the pair, while o4-mini (high) 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. o4-mini (high) 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. o4-mini (high) only becomes the better choice if you need the larger 200K context window or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.6
o4-mini (high)
58.5
GPT-5.2 Instant
75.5
o4-mini (high)
38.7
GPT-5.2 Instant
93.1
o4-mini (high)
68.3
GPT-5.2 Instant
90.9
o4-mini (high)
77.4
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.8
o4-mini (high)
61.2
GPT-5.2 Instant
95
o4-mini (high)
83
GPT-5.2 Instant
94.4
o4-mini (high)
81.7
GPT-5.2 Instant
97.2
o4-mini (high)
82.9
GPT-5.2 Instant is ahead overall, 85 to 63. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 74 and 34.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.8 versus 61.2. 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 38.7. 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 82.9. Inside this category, AIME 2023 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 77.4. Inside this category, SimpleQA 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 58.5. 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 68.3. 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 83. 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 81.7. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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