Lord Krishna, Hinduism’s compassionate god of divine love, is often portrayed with a flute in hand. Perhaps that has something to do with the story that when he cut a large drum in half, producing two hand drums for rhythmic accompaniment,…
Yesterday, just as OpenAI celebrated its 10-year anniversary, the AI company launched GPT-5.2, its latest series of AI models to power ChatGPT. The latest release is allegedly in response to OpenAI’s rumored “code red” state, as the AI market share leader is reportedly bleeding users to Google’s Gemini 3 and other AI chatbots.
The main competition appears to be between Gemini 3 and GPT-5.2, as Google’s Gemini 3 has made pretty big waves since it launched in mid-November. Gemini 3 and GPT-5.2 appear to be neck and neck in most metrics, showing that OpenAI still has the chops to compete with the top dogs. However, Grok 4.1 is also a mainstay on leaderboards, and it’s put up some pretty good scores of its own.
So, if you’re curious how GPT-5.2 compares to Grok 4.1, we can offer an initial assessment. Keep in mind that GPT-5.2 is still fresh out of the box. This means that the benchmark scores will certainly change over time as more people get their hands on it to run it through its paces.
GPT-5.2 vs. Grok 4.1: LMArena rankings
GPT-5.2 isn’t ranked on most of LMArena’s leaderboards at the time of this writing. Thus, it makes it difficult to compare the two directly from here. That doesn’t mean that we can’t try. According to OpenAI, GPT-5.2 is a few percentage points higher in almost every metric compared to GPT-5.1, which is ranked on LMArena.
Assuming GPT-5.2 usurps GPT-5.1 in every category, we can conclude that GPT-5.2 will either be at or very close to the top of the leaderboards. In the one metric where GPT-5.2 exists on LMArena at this time — which is WebDev — OpenAI’s model is currently ranked second overall (above Grok).
So, we can conclude that GPT-5.2 will probably rank higher than Grok in almost every category, although Grok may retain its second-place finish on the Text leaderboard, where it places just below Gemini 3.
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GPT-5.2 vs. Grok 4.1: Benchmark tests
Since GPT-5.2 is so new, it hasn’t shown up on a lot of independent benchmark tests yet. For the time being, we have to rely on OpenAI’s self-reported benchmark scores. Keep in mind that these scores are part of a press release and have not been independently verified.
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Creative Writing v3 – GPT-5.2 vastly outperforms Grok 4.1 here, with an ELO Score of 1675.5 versus Grok 4.1’s 1268.6.
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GDPval-AA – GPT-5.2 also wins this one, scoring a 1474 versus Grok’s 1041.
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GPQA Diamond – GPT-5.2 pulls out another win here, but the gap is much lower, with GPT-5.2 scoring a 90.3% and Grok 4 scoring an 87.7%.
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AIME 2025 – GPT-5.1 beats Grok with a score of 95.7% to 92.7%. It stands to reason that GPT-5.2 will top the leaderboards here and beat Grok as well.
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FrontierMath – Another big win for GPT-5.2 here, with a much higher accuracy than Grok 4.
The other benchmarks pretty much tell the same story. GPT-5.2 beats Grok 4.1 on benchmarks, and the margins aren’t typically very close. Real-world results may vary, though, as benchmarks only really tell part of the story.
GPT-5.2 vs. Grok 4.1: Availability
Both AI models are generally available to the public via OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Grok’s chat platform, respectively. In terms of features, both have AI chatbot functionality and the ability to generate images directly from the AI chatbot. ChatGPT can make videos with the help of Sora 2, while Grok can generate videos and images from its Grok Imagine platform. Both Sora and Grok Imagine lag far behind rivals like Google’s Veo 3 and LumaAI’s Ray3, however.
Availability is largely the same, as most people interact with ChatGPT and Grok directly through their interfaces. However, ChatGPT is integrated into more products than Grok, giving it a leg up in terms of overall availability.
GPT-5.2 vs. Grok 4.1: Pricing
For GPT-5.2, you have to get the pro version of ChatGPT, which starts at $20 per month or $200 per month, depending on what you want. Grok’s free version also limits you to Grok 4, and not Grok 4.1, so you also need a subscription for Grok 4.1. A SuperGrok subscription starts at $30 per month and goes up to $300 per month if you want more access.
That gives GPT-5.2 the edge, as everyone who passed the first grade knows, $20 is less than $30.
As for which one is worth it more, you’ll have to try out both AI platforms for yourself and see which one performs better for the kind of work you want them to do. Benchmarks and price tags don’t mean much if one of them simply doesn’t work as well as the other for your particular use case.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.