NLP Lineage

11 December 2025 · Reasoning

GPT-5.2

GPT-5.2

OpenAI

Date
11 December 2025
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
OpenAI
Access
API only
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
Learning phases
3. API usage and prompting

A milestone: 1 later milestone descends directly from it, and its descendants reach 2 of the 10 threads. How levels are decided

Figures quoted here are reported by the organisation that built it, not independently verified.

Read the primary source (openai.com)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

Gemini 3 had taken several benchmark leads in November.

The problem

Competitive response now has to arrive in weeks, not generations.

What it introduced

A fast follow-up release in the GPT-5 series.

Why it matters

It marks how short the frontier release cycle had become by the end of 2025.

What modern models inherit

Point releases as the unit of frontier competition.

What came next

GPT-5.3-Codex through 5.6 across 2026.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

GPT-5.2 has 45 documented ancestors across 11 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 18 turning points among them.

GPT-5.2 has 45 documented ancestors across 11 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

GPT-5.2 has 58 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 11 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 18 turning points among them.

GPT-5.2 has 58 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 11 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2025GPT-5.2This milestone.
  2. 2025GPT-5.1GPT-5.2 built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  3. 2025GPT-5GPT-5.1 built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  4. 2025o3 releasedGPT-5 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2024o3 announcedo3 released succeeded thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024o1 Turning pointo3 released built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2024GPT-4oGPT-5 succeeded thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  8. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  9. 2023Function callingo3 released was influenced by thisChapter 13. Models that act
  10. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  11. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  12. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  13. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointo1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  14. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  15. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  16. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by this
    InstructGPT built directly on this
    GPT-3.5 built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  17. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  18. 2019T5 Turning pointFLAN was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  19. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  20. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  21. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  22. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointScaling laws was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  23. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  24. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  25. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  26. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  27. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  28. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  29. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  30. 2017Transformer Turning pointScaling laws built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  31. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  32. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on this
    GPT-2 built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  33. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  34. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  35. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  36. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  37. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  38. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  39. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  40. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  41. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  42. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  43. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  44. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  45. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  46. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2025GPT-5.2This milestone.
  2. 2025GPT-5.1GPT-5.2 built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  3. 2025GPT-5GPT-5.1 built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  4. 2025o3 releasedGPT-5 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2024o3 announcedo3 released succeeded thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024o1 Turning pointo3 released built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2024Test-time computeo3 announced was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  8. 2024GPT-4oGPT-5 succeeded thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  9. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  10. 2023Function callingo3 released was influenced by thisChapter 13. Models that act
  11. 2023Process supervisiono1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  12. 2023Tree of thoughtsTest-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  13. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  14. 2023ToolformerFunction calling was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  15. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  16. 2022ReActFunction calling was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  17. 2022WhisperGPT-4o was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  18. 2022STaRo1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  19. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  20. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  21. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointo1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  22. 2021WebGPTReAct was influenced by this
    Toolformer was influenced by this    Chapter 13. Models that act
  23. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  24. 2021CLIPGPT-4V was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  25. 2020Vision TransformerCLIP built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  26. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  27. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by this
    InstructGPT built directly on this
    GPT-3.5 built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  28. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  29. 2019T5 Turning pointFLAN was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  30. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  31. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  32. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  33. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointScaling laws was influenced by this
    CLIP built directly on this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  34. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  35. 2019Transformer-XLSparse Transformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  36. 2018BERT Turning pointVision Transformer was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  37. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  38. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  39. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by this
    GPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  40. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by this
    GPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  41. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  42. 2017RLHF origino1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  43. 2017Transformer Turning pointWhisper built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  44. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  45. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  46. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  47. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointBERT was influenced by this
    GPT-1 was influenced by this    Chapter 2. Words become vectors
  48. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  49. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  50. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  51. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  52. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  53. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  54. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  55. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  56. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  57. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  58. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  59. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

GPT-5.2 has 4 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to GPT-5.6 Sol in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

GPT-5.2 has 4 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to GPT-5.6 Sol in 2026. Showing all of them.

GPT-5.2 has 4 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 2 chapters, reaching forward to GPT-5.6 Sol in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

GPT-5.2 has 4 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 2 chapters, reaching forward to GPT-5.6 Sol in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2025GPT-5.2This milestone.
  2. 2026GPT-5.3-Codexbuilt directly on GPT-5.2Chapter 13. Models that act
  3. 2026GPT-5.4built directly on GPT-5.3-CodexChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  4. 2026GPT-5.5built directly on GPT-5.4Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  5. 2026GPT-5.6 Solbuilt directly on GPT-5.5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  1. 2025GPT-5.2This milestone.
  2. 2026GPT-5.3-Codexbuilt directly on GPT-5.2Chapter 13. Models that act
  3. 2026GPT-5.4built directly on GPT-5.3-CodexChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  4. 2026GPT-5.5built directly on GPT-5.4Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  5. 2026GPT-5.6 Solbuilt directly on GPT-5.5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

Developed alongside

What it led to

Built on directly by