Open AI has officially launched its latest flagship model, GPT-5. The company also released a detailed official prompt guide for GPT-5, aimed at helping users maximize the potential of GPT-5 in complex tasks, programming, and multimodal interactions.
Guide Highlights: Optimizing Complex Tasks and Programming
In its official prompt guide, Open AI elaborates on how to enhance GPT-5's performance in agent tasks (agentic tasks), code generation, and instruction following through precise prompt design. According to the guide, GPT-5 demonstrates higher autonomy and contextual understanding in agent tasks, especially when dealing with tool calls and long context. The guide suggests adjusting the reasoning_effort parameter to balance the model's quick response with deep analysis. For example, lowering the reasoning effort can improve efficiency for simple queries, while high reasoning effort is recommended for complex problems to ensure accuracy.
In programming, GPT-5 is hailed as the "strongest code model," capable of generating front-end interfaces, debugging large codebases, and even building applications from scratch. The guide highlights that combining the Responses API can significantly improve code generation efficiency by retaining reasoning context, reducing output token consumption by approximately 50%-80%. This optimization is particularly suitable for development scenarios requiring multiple rounds of interaction, such as automated code reviews or multi-file refactoring.
Controlling Agent Behavior: From Cautious to Autonomous
The guide also explores how to adjust GPT-5's agentic eagerness through prompts. For scenarios requiring rapid responses, users can reduce the model's "over-exploration" by limiting the number of tool calls or clearly defining task objectives.
For example, the guide provides a prompt template suggesting setting a "maximum of 2 tool calls" to prioritize quick results. In scenarios requiring high autonomy, users can encourage the model to actively explore and reduce dependency on users by increasing the reasoning effort or adding instructions like "continue until the task is completed."
Additionally, the guide emphasizes the importance of tool preambles, recommending that users ask the model to provide clear plans and progress updates when executing complex tasks. This transparent interaction method significantly improves user experience, especially in long-running tasks.
Multimodal and Personalization: Closer to User Needs
GPT-5 not only advances text processing but also supports multimodal interactions, including text, images, voice, and even preliminary video processing capabilities.
The guide suggests using clear contextual instructions (e.g., "process the image and generate a description") to fully leverage its multimodal features. Additionally, GPT-5 introduces personalization features, such as custom chat colors, preset personas (like "cynic" or "listener"), and integration with tools like Gmail and Google Calendar, further enhancing its practicality.
Safety and Reliability: Reducing Hallucinations
Open AI emphasized in the guide that GPT-5 has significantly reduced the occurrence of hallucinations through enhanced training and safety assessments. Compared to previous models o3 and GPT-4o, GPT-5's error rate dropped by approximately 45%-80% in anonymized production traffic testing. The guide recommends using the "safe completions" feature to ensure the model provides high-quality answers that meet safety constraints in sensitive tasks, and clearly explains the reasons if it cannot answer.
Implications for the AI Industry
The GPT-5 prompt guide not only provides users with practical tools but also reflects Open AI's strategic direction in simplifying AI interactions, improving model efficiency, and ensuring reliability. By unifying the model architecture (integrating GPT and o-series models), Open AI aims to eliminate the complexity of traditional model selection, making AI "ready to use out of the box." This means lower barriers and higher productivity for developers, researchers, and everyday users alike.
However, community feedback has also raised some concerns. Some users point out that although GPT-5 shows significant performance improvements, its API costs may be high, and the improvement in certain tasks has not fully met expectations. AIbase believes that as more users and developers delve deeper into using GPT-5, its actual performance and optimization potential will become clearer.
Conclusion
Open AI's official GPT-5 prompt guide offers users a scientific and practical toolkit to help them fully realize the potential of this cutting-edge model. From agent tasks to multimodal interactions and safe completions, GPT-5 demonstrates new heights in generalization and specialization of AI technology. AIbase will continue to monitor GPT-5's practical application performance and community feedback, bringing you more cutting-edge information.
Official Guide Access: https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/gpt-5/gpt-5_prompting_guide