ChatGPT 5 Pro is the muscle car engine of OpenAI’s new line of GPT-5 AI models for ChatGPT. Unlike the standard versions, Pro is designed to think deeper, write longer, research harder, and generally behave like it's worth the $200 a month necessary to use it. The GPT-5 Pro model has more computational power behind it, and requires around five minutes per prompt to respond because of it.

The standard ChatGPT-5 might be plenty for most people, but I wanted to see just what a difference it could make when given complex prompts better designed for Pro. I was skeptical about whether more power would mean better answers, and decided to test the Pro model against its more pedestrian sibling. The test prompts all involve multiple complex issues; take a look at how the two models performed.

ChatGPT-5 had a couple of paragraphs explaining black hole physics, from gravitational collapse to event horizons and singularities. It then proposed a building called the "Event Horizon Tower," describing "a cylindrical megastructure in a major city, designed to evoke both the mystery and spectacle of a black hole." Using a reflective, curved façade made of darkened glass and adaptive panels, the AI suggested light would scatter so that as you walked past, your own reflection would "stretch and curve, like time and space being tugged."

Pro took a much more narrative approach to explain the science of black holes, with shades of Werner Herzog and Neil deGrasse Tyson going through it. The building that it came up with is called the Ergosphere, which it suggested would be a public science and performing arts center set into a sunken urban plaza.

As for its black hole connection, the AI went on an evocative tour throughout the building, starting with the gravity well of "a gentle amphitheater carved as concentric steps that pull you down toward the entrance" of the "toroidal ring hovering above the plaza on a diagrid of slender struts" its outer surface a low‑reflectance ceramic-metal composite that reads as deep matte at noon and liquid at dusk."