GPT-3.5 Turbo
OpenAI
OpenAI's widely-adopted cost-effective model released March 2023. Optimized for chat via Chat Completions API with natural language and code generation capabilities. Features 16K context window (20 pages of text). Significantly cheaper than GPT-4 family while maintaining solid performance for most common use cases. Priced at $0.50 per 1M input tokens and $1.50 per 1M output (60% cheaper than previous pricing). Enhanced with better steerability, improved function calling, and extended context. Widely deployed in production applications globally. GPT-4o-mini now recommended upgrade for better performance at similar cost.
Strengths
- Extremely cost-effective - $0.50 per 1M input tokens
- Widely deployed and battle-tested in production
- 16K context window handles most common use cases
- Function calling enables tool use and structured outputs
- Fast response times compared to GPT-4 family
- Strong performance on general chat and basic coding tasks
- Available via Azure and OpenAI directly
Caveats
- Outperformed by GPT-4o-mini at similar cost ($0.15 vs $0.50 input)
- Significantly weaker than GPT-4o/GPT-5 series on complex reasoning
- 16K context smaller than modern models (GPT-4o: 128K)
- No vision or multimodal capabilities
- Knowledge cutoff September 2021 older than GPT-4 family
- Consider migrating to GPT-4o-mini for better quality at lower cost
- Vendor
- OpenAI
- Context Window
- 16,385 tokens
- Max Output
- 4,096 tokens
- License
- Proprietary
- Release Date
- 2023-03-21
- Modalities
- text
| Benchmark | Score | Max |
|---|---|---|
| livebench_language | 28.6 | 100.0 |
| livebench_coding | 27.7 | 100.0 |
| livebench_instruction_following | 74.5 | 100.0 |
Capabilities
Vision
Audio
Video
Tool Use
Resources
Pricing
$0.50 per 1M input tokens, $1.50 per 1M output tokens