GPT-3.5 Turbo Explained: Features, Comparisons, Pricing & Use Cases (2025)

GPT-3.5 Turbo is an advanced large language model developed by OpenAI, serving as a bridge between the earlier GPT-3 and the newer GPT-4 series.

Introduced in late 2022, GPT-3.5 Turbo powers many everyday AI applications, including the wildly popular ChatGPT chatbot.

It offers a combination of speed, affordability, and reliable performance that makes it one of the best GPT models for everyday use.

In this article, we’ll explain what GPT-3.5 Turbo is, how it compares to GPT-3, GPT-4, and GPT-4o, and why it’s a go-to choice for chatbots, productivity tools, customer support, content generation, and more.

We’ll also cover its key features, real-world use cases, pricing, and how you can access it (via ChatGPT Plus, API, etc.), all in simple terms.

What is GPT-3.5 Turbo?

GPT-3.5 Turbo is part of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer series and refers to a refined version of GPT-3 that was developed in 2022. It represents an intermediate step between GPT-3 (released in 2020) and GPT-4 (released in 2023).

OpenAI first hinted at the GPT-3.5 series in March 2022 with new model updates like text-davinci-002, and by November 2022 they officially referred to these enhanced models as “GPT-3.5” when launching ChatGPT, which was fine-tuned from a GPT-3.5 model.

In fact, ChatGPT’s initial public release on November 30, 2022 was powered by a GPT-3.5 model.

This new model improved upon GPT-3 by following instructions better, producing more natural responses, and reducing biases.

The “Turbo” designation of GPT-3.5 Turbo indicates the version optimized for chat interactions. It’s the same model that underpins the ChatGPT experience and the Chat Completions API.

OpenAI released GPT-3.5 Turbo to developers via API on March 1, 2023.

The Turbo model is designed for fast, interactive conversations and has been fine-tuned with techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to make its responses more helpful and aligned with user intentions.

In short, GPT-3.5 Turbo is the conversational AI model that made ChatGPT’s friendly Q&A and creative dialogue possible, standing between the original GPT-3 and the more advanced GPT-4.

Key Features and Capabilities of GPT-3.5 Turbo

GPT-3.5 Turbo inherited the powerful language abilities of GPT-3 and took them further with fine-tuning for instructions and dialogue. Its key features and capabilities include:

  • Natural Language Understanding and Generation: GPT-3.5 Turbo can understand and produce human-like text based on prompts. It is adept at answering questions, carrying on conversations, and completing sentences or paragraphs in a coherent way. This makes it suitable for chatbots and virtual assistants that need to respond in a conversational tone.
  • Instruction Following: Unlike the original GPT-3 which sometimes went off-track, GPT-3.5 Turbo was trained to follow user instructions more reliably. It was fine-tuned with human feedback to provide more relevant and factual responses while avoiding inappropriate content. As a result, GPT-3.5 Turbo generally produces answers that better align with what the user asked for, with fewer made-up facts or tangents.
  • Multilingual and Translation Abilities: The model can translate text between languages with a reasonable level of fluency. It can also converse in multiple languages, making it useful for global applications or for users who interact in languages other than English.
  • Summarization and Content Generation: GPT-3.5 Turbo excels at summarizing long texts into concise explanations or summaries. It can read a piece of documentation or an article and produce a shorter recap of the main points. Moreover, it can generate content for various purposes – from drafting emails and writing blog posts to composing poems or even writing computer code in multiple programming languages. This versatility makes it a handy tool for content creation and brainstorming.
  • Conversational Memory (Context): In a chat setting, GPT-3.5 Turbo can remember the context of the conversation up to a certain limit, allowing for multi-turn dialogues where it refers back to earlier messages. The original GPT-3.5 Turbo model supports roughly 4,096 tokens of context (around 3,000 words) in a conversation. OpenAI later introduced a GPT-3.5 Turbo 16K variant that extends the context window to about 16,384 tokens (four times longer). This means GPT-3.5 Turbo can handle fairly lengthy conversations or documents, although extremely long inputs might require the 16K version. By comparison, the base GPT-3 model had a smaller context window (around 2048 tokens), so GPT-3.5 improved the amount of text it can consider at once.

Overall, GPT-3.5 Turbo’s capabilities make it a well-rounded AI assistant.

It can handle a wide array of tasks such as answering questions, engaging in dialogue, translating languages, summarizing text, writing creatively, and generating code.

While it may not be as advanced or as precise in complex tasks as GPT-4, GPT-3.5 Turbo is remarkably capable for most everyday applications – and it does so with speed and efficiency.

GPT-3.5 Turbo vs. GPT-3, GPT-4, and GPT-4o – Key Differences

How does GPT-3.5 Turbo stack up against its predecessor (GPT-3), its successor (GPT-4), and the newer GPT-4o model? Below we compare these models in terms of speed, pricing, context length, and use cases to understand the differences:

ModelReleaseKey FeaturesSpeedContext LimitUsage & Pricing
GPT-3 (Davinci)June 2020 (GPT-3)175B parameters; text generation; requires careful prompting (not instruction-tuned).Fast for its time, but less optimized than newer models.~4K tokens input/output (for Davinci model).API access was costly (e.g. ~$0.06 per 1K tokens for Davinci); no free chat interface initially.
GPT-3.5 Turbo175B parameters; text generation; requires careful prompting (not instruction-tuned).Improved GPT-3 with instruction tuning (uses RLHF) for better alignment; optimized for chat.Very fast responses (optimized for real-time chat).4K tokens (standard); 16K tokens variant available.Free via ChatGPT (default model); API cost ~$0.002 per 1K tokens (extremely affordable).
GPT-4March 2023~1 trillion parameters (much larger); more reliable, creative, and can handle images (multimodal). Excels at complex tasks and nuanced instructions.Slower than GPT-3.5 (due to size); higher latency for responses.8K tokens (standard), 32K tokens extended version; later GPT-4 Turbo allowed up to 128K tokens input.Paid access via ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo for GPT-4 model); API cost much higher (e.g. ~$0.03–$0.06 per 1K tokens).
GPT-4o (Omni)May 2024Multimodal (text, images, audio); real-time voice chat capability; state-of-the-art reasoning.Very fast (faster than GPT-4 Turbo) – can respond nearly in real-time for voice.Up to 128K token context (for GPT-4o mini); extremely large input capacity.Free for general use (became base model in ChatGPT by mid-2024); more cost-effective and ~50–60% cheaper to run than GPT-3.5 Turbo for developers.

Speed and performance: GPT-3.5 Turbo is known for its snappy responses in chat – it’s optimized to be lightweight and quick.

GPT-3 (especially the Davinci model) was also quite responsive, but GPT-3.5 Turbo further reduced latency.

GPT-4, on the other hand, is slower in generating replies because it’s far more complex and heavy (with about an order of magnitude more parameters than GPT-3.5).

To improve GPT-4’s usability, OpenAI later released GPT-4 Turbo (in late 2023) which sped up responses and reduced costs, offering a 128K token context window and being 3× cheaper on prompts and 2× cheaper on outputs than the original GPT-4.

Even so, GPT-3.5 Turbo generally remains the faster option for quick back-and-forth interactions.

Meanwhile, GPT-4o (Omni) introduced in 2024 took performance a step further – OpenAI designed it to handle multimodal input (including voice) with extremely low latency, reportedly averaging only ~320 milliseconds for voice responses.

In practice, GPT-4o and its mini version can engage in near real-time conversations, making them faster or on par with GPT-3.5 Turbo despite their greater capabilities.

Capabilities and context: In terms of raw capabilities, GPT-4 is more advanced than GPT-3.5 Turbo.

GPT-4 scores much higher on many academic and professional benchmarks and can handle more nuanced instructions and complex problems.

It also introduced multimodality, meaning GPT-4 can accept images as input (e.g. describing an image or diagram) whereas GPT-3.5 Turbo is text-only.

GPT-4 has a larger knowledge base (trained on more recent and diverse data) and stronger reasoning skills, which makes it better at tasks like writing long creative pieces, solving tricky math problems, or analyzing lengthy documents.

However, GPT-4’s power comes with limitations: it was initially restricted to an 8,192-token context (with an optional 32K version), and it is slower and costlier to use.

GPT-3.5 Turbo originally had a 4K token context window, but the GPT-3.5-Turbo-16K model expanded this to ~16K tokens, allowing it to handle much longer inputs or conversations (about 20 pages of text in one go).

Still, GPT-4 (and especially GPT-4 Turbo) can take even more content in a single prompt – up to 128K tokens in the latest versions, which is enough to process an entire book.

The GPT-4o model also launched with a large context window and by late 2024 had been updated to output up to 16K tokens at once.

In summary, GPT-4 and GPT-4o are superior for very large or complex tasks, but GPT-3.5 Turbo offers a sweet spot for moderately sized tasks with speed and efficiency.

Typical use cases: GPT-3.5 Turbo shines in everyday applications where speed and cost-efficiency matter more than absolute cutting-edge reasoning.

This includes chatbots and assistants, customer support Q&A systems, drafting emails and social media content, language translation, and lightweight brainstorming or coding help.

Because it’s inexpensive to run and still quite capable, many businesses have used GPT-3.5 Turbo for high-volume tasks (such as handling thousands of customer queries or generating lots of content) where GPT-4 would be overkill or too costly.

GPT-3 (original) was used in early AI applications for text generation, but it lacked the fine-tuned conversational skills – developers often had to engineer prompts carefully to get good results.

GPT-3.5 Turbo largely solved that by being chat-ready out of the box. GPT-4 is chosen for critical or complex tasks: for instance, legal document analysis, advanced coding assistance, composing long-form creative writing, or any scenario where the highest accuracy is required (GPT-4 is ~40% more factually accurate than GPT-3.5 in OpenAI’s evaluations).

GPT-4o, being the latest, is extending AI into multimodal domains – it can power voice assistants that talk to you, analyze images (for example, describing a photo or reading a chart), and tackle tasks requiring real-time interaction.

GPT-4o is seen in cutting-edge applications like voice-enabled AI tutors, image analysis tools, and next-gen virtual agents.

It’s also noteworthy that as of mid-2024, GPT-4o mini essentially replaced GPT-3.5 Turbo as the default model behind ChatGPT for free users, since it offers better performance at lower cost.

Even so, GPT-3.5 Turbo remains widely used via API and is still one of the best all-purpose models for everyday use due to its balance of capability and efficiency.

Pricing and access: One of GPT-3.5 Turbo’s biggest advantages is its low cost and easy accessibility.

OpenAI made GPT-3.5 available for free to the public through the ChatGPT interface – the free version of ChatGPT runs on GPT-3.5 by default. This means anyone can try out GPT-3.5 Turbo’s capabilities at no charge on chat. (with certain usage limits).

For developers and businesses, GPT-3.5 Turbo is accessible via the OpenAI API at a very affordable price: initially $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (which is roughly 750 words) – about 10× cheaper than the previous GPT-3 Davinci model of similar capability.

In June 2023, OpenAI even reduced the cost further by 25% for input tokens (to $0.0015/1K for inputs, $0.002/1K for outputs), and introduced the 16K context model at ~$0.003–$0.004 per 1K tokens.

In practical terms, this means you can process hundreds of pages of text for only a few cents, which dramatically lowers the barrier for integrating AI into everyday tools.

By contrast, GPT-4’s API is much pricier – roughly $0.03 to $0.06 per 1K tokens for standard 8K context (and double that for 32K context), and GPT-4 Turbo (128K context) comes in around $0.01 to $0.03 per 1K.

Also, GPT-4 usage through ChatGPT requires a ChatGPT Plus subscription (currently $20 per month), which grants priority access to GPT-4 but still with usage caps.

OpenAI later introduced ChatGPT Pro at $200/month for power users and enterprise plans for larger organizations. GPT-4o, interestingly, was announced as free to use for everyone (with ChatGPT Plus users getting higher usage limits) – signaling OpenAI’s push to make advanced AI more accessible.

For developers, GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini are also offered via API/Azure with costs claimed to be about 50% lower than GPT-4 Turbo for the same tasks.

In summary, GPT-3.5 Turbo is extremely cost-effective for everyday use, while GPT-4 and beyond are more premium services used when their extra power is needed.

Real-World Use Cases for GPT-3.5 Turbo

GPT-3.5 Turbo’s mix of strong capabilities and low cost has led to its adoption in a wide range of real-world applications.

Here are some notable use cases where GPT-3.5 Turbo excels:

  • Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: The most famous example is ChatGPT itself – the free ChatGPT service is powered by GPT-3.5 Turbo to answer users’ questions, assist with tasks, and provide conversational responses. Many companies have built custom chatbots on top of GPT-3.5 Turbo to handle customer inquiries or provide information 24/7. For instance, Snapchat’s “My AI” feature is a chatbot for users that runs on GPT-3.5 Turbo, offering friendly advice and even composing fun messages (like writing a haiku for a friend). These chatbots can understand user intent and respond in a personable way, making them useful for customer support, personal assistants, and interactive FAQ systems.
  • Productivity and Content Generation Tools: GPT-3.5 Turbo is used in tools that help users be more productive in writing and research. It can draft emails, generate ideas for social media posts, or even write code snippets, acting like an AI writing assistant or coding helper. For example, Quizlet’s Q-Chat uses GPT-3.5 Turbo as an AI tutor that converses with students and helps them study. It can explain concepts or quiz the student in a chat format. Other productivity use cases include summarizing meeting notes, writing documentation, creating marketing copy, or brainstorming blog article outlines – all of which GPT-3.5 can do quickly. Its ability to generate coherent text in various styles is a huge time-saver for content creators and professionals.
  • Customer Support and Service: Businesses are integrating GPT-3.5 Turbo into customer support workflows to answer common questions or guide users. With some fine-tuning or additional business data, GPT-3.5 can handle a wide variety of support tickets – from answering “How do I reset my password?” to helping track orders. Since it’s cost-effective, it can be scaled to handle large volumes of queries. For instance, e-commerce apps like Instacart’s “Ask Instacart” feature use ChatGPT tech (GPT-3.5) to let customers ask open-ended questions about recipes or products and get helpful answers. Similarly, internal IT helpdesks or HR chatbots can use GPT-3.5 to answer employee questions. The model’s language fluency makes interactions feel more natural compared to script-based chatbots of the past.
  • Creative Content and Entertainment: Many users have enjoyed GPT-3.5 Turbo for more playful or creative tasks as well. It can tell stories, role-play characters, compose poems or lyrics, and generate creative fiction. This makes it a tool for game developers or storytellers. Some people use GPT-3.5 via the API to generate dialogue for video games or to create interactive fiction experiences. Its ability to adapt style or persona (when given the right prompts or system instructions) allows for creative experimentation in entertainment apps.
  • Education and Training: As mentioned with Quizlet’s tutor, GPT-3.5 Turbo can serve as a personalized educational aide. It can explain complex topics in simpler terms, generate practice questions, or simulate a Socratic dialogue with a student. Language learning apps have used it to practice conversation in different languages or to explain grammar. It’s like having a knowledgeable (but sometimes imperfect) tutor on demand. Because it’s relatively cheap to run, even individual educators or small startups have leveraged GPT-3.5 to build learning tools without incurring huge AI costs.

It’s worth noting that while GPT-3.5 Turbo performs impressively in these areas, developers often put safeguards and provide guidance for the model to ensure accuracy and appropriateness (since the model can occasionally produce incorrect or nonsensical answers if prompted ambiguously).

However, the above examples show how versatile and pervasive GPT-3.5 Turbo has become in real-world applications – from helping shoppers with recipes to powering AI companions on social platforms.

Pricing and How to Access GPT-3.5 Turbo

One reason GPT-3.5 Turbo is considered the “best GPT model for everyday use” is how easy and affordable it is to access. Here are the common ways you can use GPT-3.5 Turbo:

  • ChatGPT (Free): The simplest way is through OpenAI’s ChatGPT website. The free tier of ChatGPT uses GPT-3.5 Turbo as the default model to handle your chats. Anyone can sign up and start chatting with GPT-3.5 Turbo at no cost. This free access has popularized AI assistance for millions of people, as GPT-3.5 can help with tasks like writing a paragraph, translating a sentence, or fixing a piece of code in seconds. The free version does have some rate limits (to prevent abuse) and may sometimes be unavailable during peak times, but it’s a great entry point to experience GPT-3.5’s capabilities.
  • ChatGPT Plus (Paid): OpenAI offers a subscription called ChatGPT Plus for $20 per month, which initially was introduced to provide access to GPT-4, the more advanced model. With Plus, you can choose to use GPT-4 for your chats (which is slower and has usage caps) or continue with GPT-3.5 Turbo with the added benefits of priority service (GPT-3.5 on Plus might respond even faster and is less likely to be unavailable during high demand). Essentially, Plus guarantees you access to the AI even when the free service is busy, and unlocks the option to try GPT-4 for more complex queries. That said, for many users’ everyday needs, GPT-3.5 Turbo is sufficient and remains available for free. (In fact, as OpenAI’s models evolved, the Plus plan now includes newer variants like GPT-4.1 or GPT-4o-mini, but GPT-3.5 Turbo is still there as a workhorse model.)
  • OpenAI API GPT-3.5 Turbo: For developers or tech-savvy users, the OpenAI API gives direct access to GPT-3.5 Turbo’s capabilities in your own applications or scripts. By obtaining an API key from OpenAI, you can integrate GPT-3.5 into apps, websites, or business workflows. The API usage is priced by tokens (pieces of text), and as mentioned, GPT-3.5 Turbo is extremely affordable: on the order of $0.002 per 1,000 tokens of input/output. To put that in perspective, generating about 500 words might cost a fraction of a penny. This low cost enabled startups and larger companies alike to incorporate GPT-3.5 into their services. For example, Shopify’s Shop app uses GPT-3.5 via API to power a shopping assistant that gives product recommendations in natural language. Developers can choose the gpt-3.5-turbo model in the API for chat-style interactions and even specify system instructions or fine-tune the behavior slightly. OpenAI continuously updates the GPT-3.5 Turbo API with improvements – developers using the API automatically get the latest stable GPT-3.5 model updates over time.
  • Third-party Platforms: Beyond OpenAI’s official channels, GPT-3.5 Turbo is available through various platforms and tools. For instance, Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service offers GPT-3.5 models (under the name GPT-3.5 or GPT-35-Turbo) as a part of its cloud AI offerings for enterprise integration. There are also chatbot platforms (like Poe by Quora, or other AI assistant apps) that allow users to interact with GPT-3.5 Turbo without directly using OpenAI’s site – these platforms essentially call the OpenAI API behind the scenes. One such platform is GPT-Gate.Chat, which provides a gateway to experiment with different GPT models. On GPT-Gate.Chat, you can select GPT-3.5 Turbo and chat with it directly through a web interface. This can be convenient if you want to try GPT-3.5 Turbo in a context outside of the official ChatGPT site or integrate it with other model experiences. (GPT-Gate.Chat is the website for which this article is written, and it lets users explore various GPT models easily.)

In summary, if you’re an end-user, ChatGPT’s free version is the quickest way to use GPT-3.5 Turbo – just hop on and start typing. If you need more reliability or the enhanced GPT-4 model, ChatGPT Plus is available at a modest monthly fee.

And if you’re building a custom solution or app, the API gives you flexible, pay-as-you-go access to GPT-3.5 Turbo’s brain. The combination of free availability and cheap API pricing has made GPT-3.5 Turbo one of the most widely used AI models to date.

Is GPT-3.5 Turbo the Best GPT Model for Everyday Use?

Considering all the factors – capability, speed, cost, and access – GPT-3.5 Turbo hits a “Goldilocks” zone for everyday use. For most day-to-day tasks that an average user or business might have, GPT-3.5 Turbo offers just the right balance:

  • Affordability: GPT-3.5 Turbo is extremely cost-effective. Whether you’re a student, a small business, or a large enterprise, using GPT-3.5 Turbo won’t break the bank. The free availability via ChatGPT means individuals can use it to boost their productivity or learning at no cost. Meanwhile, businesses can leverage the API at scale very economically. In contrast, more advanced models like GPT-4, while powerful, come at a significantly higher price point. For routine tasks (summaries, simple code generation, drafting responses, etc.), GPT-4’s extra capability might not justify the extra cost or slower speed.
  • Speed and Convenience: GPT-3.5 Turbo is fast – it typically responds in seconds, making it feel interactive and useful for real-time assistance. If you’re using a chatbot to get help or an AI writing assistant while you work, speed matters. GPT-4 can sometimes take noticeably longer to produce a response (especially for lengthy prompts), which can interrupt the flow. For everyday queries (“Rewrite this sentence to sound polite” or “What’s a quick recipe for dinner?”), GPT-3.5’s quick replies enhance user experience. Additionally, being the default model in ChatGPT, it’s readily available without special setup. This convenience means less friction in using AI day-to-day.
  • Competent Performance: Perhaps the most important point is that GPT-3.5 Turbo is very competent on general tasks. It might not ace an Ivy League exam or solve high-level math as reliably as GPT-4, but it handles the majority of common needs with ease. Need to summarize an article? GPT-3.5 can do it accurately most of the time. Need a draft of a blog section or some creative suggestions? GPT-3.5 often delivers great results. For coding, GPT-3.5 can generate basic scripts or help with debug ideas (though GPT-4 is better for complex code). Unless you specifically require the advanced reasoning or multimodal abilities of the latest models, GPT-3.5 Turbo suffices – and does so at a fraction of the cost. In fact, when OpenAI first released GPT-3.5 Turbo, they noted that many early users were able to switch from the older expensive Davinci model to GPT-3.5 Turbo with minimal adjustments, getting similar or better results for a tenth of the price.
  • Use Case Fit: For “everyday use,” we’re talking about things like writing emails, answering questions, generating ideas, customer service chats, tutoring, etc. GPT-3.5 Turbo is designed for these use cases. It was literally the model that made ChatGPT a household name, precisely because it performs well in conversational and general contexts. GPT-4 and GPT-4o are more specialized – amazing for heavy-duty tasks, creativity, or specialized inputs (images, audio). But for a reliable daily AI partner that can boost your productivity or improve your services, GPT-3.5 Turbo is often the most practical choice. It’s widely integrated, well-understood, and has a proven track record with millions of users.

In conclusion, GPT-3.5 Turbo stands out as one of the best GPT models for everyday use due to its combination of strong capabilities, fast performance, and low cost.

It democratized access to AI through ChatGPT and continues to be a backbone for many applications.

While newer models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o push the boundaries of what AI can do, GPT-3.5 Turbo remains a workhorse for day-to-day tasks – truly embodying an “AI for everyone” ethos.

Call to Action: Ready to experience the benefits of GPT-3.5 Turbo for yourself? Whether you want to chat with an AI, integrate it into a project, or explore its capabilities, GPT-3.5 Turbo is a great starting point.

Head over to GPT-Gate.Chat and give GPT-3.5 Turbo a try. On GPT-Gate.Chat, you can interact with this model directly and see how it can help with your everyday tasks – from writing tips to answering questions.

Explore GPT-3.5 Turbo on GPT-Gate.Chat today, and unlock the potential of one of the best AI models for everyday use!

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