I Tested GPT 5.5 vs Opus 4.7: What You Need to Know

The video opens with a breakdown of GPT 5.5's release details. OpenAI positions it as their smartest and most intuitive model to date, codenamed 'Spud' during leaks, and describes it as a purpose-built step toward AGI and enterprise computing. The core pitch is not that it's better at everything, but that it 'does more with less' — fewer output tokens per task, less handholding, and greater autonomy. Benchmark results shown include Terminal Bench 2.0 (GPT 5.5: 82.7 vs Opus 4.7: 69.4), and GPT 5.5 outperforming Opus 4.7 on GDP Val, Frontier Math, and Cyber Gym. However, the creator notes that SWE-Bench Pro still belongs to Claude Opus 4.7. A key caveat flagged is that GPT 5.5's price doubled relative to GPT 5.4, going from $2.50/$15 to $5/$30 per million tokens input/output, making it slightly more expensive on output than Opus 4.7 — though the claimed token efficiency is supposed to offset this.

The creator then runs four one-shot coding experiments comparing GPT 5.5 via Codex against Claude Opus 4.7 via Claude Code, acknowledging this is partly an agentic harness comparison and not purely a model comparison. Experiment one was building a personal brand website. GPT 5.5 finished in ~4 minutes vs Opus's ~14 minutes and cost roughly $1 vs $5. Experiment two was a solar system simulation. Timing was closer, with Opus finishing about a minute later, but Opus produced a better visual result and was about $1 cheaper, giving Opus the win for that round. Experiment three was a 3D space shooter game. GPT 5.5 produced a smoother, more playable result in less time and at lower cost (~$3 vs ~$4.50), with the creator clearly preferring its output. Experiment four was a complex living ecosystem simulation with a much longer prompt. Both models produced outputs with broken logic — creatures wouldn't interact correctly with food and populations stagnated — making this round essentially a tie on quality, though GPT 5.5 used dramatically fewer output tokens (~28k vs much higher for Opus).

In aggregate across all four experiments, GPT 5.5's total runtime was ~21 minutes vs Opus's ~41 minutes. Input tokens were similar (~2.7M vs ~2.5M), but output tokens were starkly different (~70k for GPT 5.5 vs ~250k for Opus). Total cost came out roughly even, with GPT 5.5 being about $3 cheaper overall. The creator concludes that GPT 5.5 consistently occupied the more favorable position across speed and token efficiency metrics, and encourages viewers to test models against their specific use cases rather than chasing whichever model appears best on benchmarks.