GPT 5.5 just did what no other model could

**Claire Vo** (0:00)
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have a very special episode for you, where I'm going to tell you everything I think about the new GPT 5.5 model, which I've been able to test for the past couple of weeks. Spoiler alert, it is a powerhouse, and I've been able to do things with this model, especially around advanced coding, that I haven't been able to do before with any other model on the market. I'm going to show you how it breaks my personal high-tech eval, hacking into this little computer. Let's get to it.
Before I tell you what I built with GPT 5.5, let me tell you a little bit about the model itself. Today, OpenAI is releasing GPT 5.5 and GPT 5.5 Pro into Codex and ChatGpt, not available in the API quite yet.
This model, I've been testing for the past couple of weeks, and I will tell you what OpenAI is saying is true. They're saying that it has a higher capacity for complex work, it is more efficient, including being more token efficient, getting that work done. The whole idea with this model is it's smarter and it's more efficient, so you're going to get more done. That has really been my experience. Now, I'm glad it's more efficient because it is expensive. GPT 5.5 is $5 per million input tokens and $30 for output tokens, and GPT 5.5 Pro, which has powered all this work that I've been doing, is 30 for a million input tokens and $180 for output tokens. This is a pricey one, but when I reflect on what I was able to achieve with this model in early testing, I'm going to pay the intelligence tax because I think what I was able to achieve is really important. And this is one of the things that I think about a lot when I'm testing these new models or testing these new tools. Everything has an ROI and there can be an ROI in terms of speed. So can I get the things done that I want to get done faster? And that's certainly been an accelerant from an AI tooling perspective and something we've all experienced for the past couple of years. But where GPT 5.5 really helps me is ambition. It has been able to do things that literally I have not been able to do before for a couple of reasons. One, just intelligence higher has solved problems that other models and other harnesses other than Codex have really had a hard time with. The second thing I've experienced is because the efficiency is higher, I'm able to do more faster without losing context of what I'm working on because it's happening really quickly, or it's being more autonomous so I don't have to babysit as much. So again, I'm getting more done.
So I do believe that what OpenAI is telling us is true, but that's coming out of my own experience spending hours and hours and hours with this model, throwing problems at it that other models have really had a hard time with, including GPT 5.5. So let's talk about what I built. Folks, for the less technical here, one of the things I'm going to say about the model, and I tested it a little bit in ChatGBT, but not a lot, is that I don't know what to do with all this intelligence if you don't have complex problems to solve. So while I've tested it in ChatGBT in my personal account, which is what I got access to, I don't have complex high intelligence problems to solve in my personal account. And so it was really hard for me to think of where I would use 5.5 or 5.5 Pro in ChatGBT simply because the problems I'm solving there aren't that hard. But I did try to solve problems there. So let's just talk about quickly how I used 5.5 in ChatGBT and what it gave me. And it will just give you an indication of what I'm going to show you a little bit later. But again, I think what the consumer or even the everyday enterprise business user is going to struggle with using ChatGBT with this model is how many problems do you have that require super intelligence. So again, I think this is going to be a model that developers and software engineers really love. And I'm really excited to see what OpenAI does in terms of unleashing and boxing this intelligence in use cases that then the quote unquote everyday person can use. So that's a little bit of my lecture on how much we have an intelligence overhang basically.