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.
When not to use this
- Not ideal for sprawling research or brittle multi-hop reasoning unless you constrain scope tightly.
- Avoid for regulated or high-stakes outputs without evaluations that mimic your tooling, data, and review process.
- Promote traffic to heavier tiers inside the family when workflows need richer tools and longer horizons.
Technical specs
- Inputs
- text
- Outputs
- text
- Capabilities
- chat, classification, cheap inference
- License
- See vendor
- Model string
gpt-3-5-turbo
Benchmarks
No benchmark data yet.
OpenAI GPT family lineup
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