GPT-3.5 Turbo
GPT-3.5 Turbo is a long-standing cost-efficient chat model family on the OpenAI API for simple assistants, classification, and legacy integrations.
Newer version: GPT-4o mini
Provider
OpenAI
Model family
OpenAI GPT
LLM
Cost tier
Legacy Chat
Status
Legacy
Why teams choose it
Broad capability envelope
Useful when the same stack must cover chat, multimodal inputs, tooling, or structured-output shapes without juggling many SKUs.
Long-context analysis
Helps teams summarize, compare, and extract insights from long documents without losing important nuance.
Coding and tools
Works well for code assistance, tool calling, and agent workflows where instructions must stay consistent across steps.
Cost-efficient routing
Useful as part of a routing stack where cheap models handle drafts and confirmations and this tier handles genuinely hard passages.
Tradeoffs to know
- Weak on multi-step reasoning vs GPT-4o.
- No vision—route image tasks elsewhere.
Technical specs
- Inputs
- text
- Outputs
- text
- Capabilities
- chat, classification, cheap inference
- License
- See vendor
Benchmarks
No independent or vendor benchmark scores in this catalog entry.
OpenAI GPT family lineup
Current models
Related models
GPT-3.5 Turbo FAQ
What is GPT-3.5 Turbo?
GPT-3.5 Turbo is a long-standing cost-efficient chat model family on the OpenAI API for simple assistants, classification, and legacy integrations. Many teams still use it for non-critical paths or as a fallback when newer models are rate-limited.
When does GPT-3.5 Turbo fit best?
High-volume lightweight summarization
What should teams watch out for with GPT-3.5 Turbo?
Weak on multi-step reasoning vs GPT-4o.
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