Which AI Is Better Than GPT? A Benchmark-by-Benchmark Comparison

On the LM Council "no tools" leaderboard, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview leads at 46.4% versus GPT-5.4 Pro at 44.3% .

Coding and Agents: GPT Still Owns the Desktop

GPT models remain the strongest choice for software engineering and computer-use tasks.

• SWE-bench Pro (harder software engineering): GPT-5.4 xHigh leads the public leaderboard at 59.10% .
• SWE-bench Verified (real GitHub issue resolution): Claude Opus 4.6 leads at 80.8%, but GPT-5.4 is close at 74-80% depending on configuration .
• Coding Arena (head-to-head human preference): GPT-5.5 is the strongest model in coding-arena play .
• GDPval (professional knowledge work across 44 occupations): GPT-5.4 scores 83% wins or ties, matching industry professionals .
• OSWorld (desktop computer-use benchmarks): GPT-5.4 is the first AI model to surpass human performance at 75% .

If you are building agents that need to navigate operating systems, browsers, and terminal interfaces, GPT-5.4 remains the model to beat.

The Open-Weight Contenders: Closing Fast

The story of 2025-2026 is the collapse of the gap between proprietary and open-weight models. According to the Stanford AI Index, the MMLU benchmark gap narrowed from 17.5 percentage points to just 0.3 percentage points in a single year .

• DeepSeek V4 is competitive with GPT-5.4 on reasoning (GPQA Diamond 89% vs. 92.8%) and math (AIME 91% vs. 94.6%) .
• Qwen3-Max closely approaches top commercial models, making it an appealing choice for self-hosting .
• GLM-5.2 ranks #4 overall on BenchLM with a score of 91, the highest among open-weight models .

Task-Specific Winner Table

The Honest Truth About Benchmarks

Multiple sources note that at the frontier level in 2026, the performance differences between the top models on generalist benchmarks are smaller than the performance difference between a well-designed prompt and a poorly designed one using the same model . The top 15 models are separated by as little as 3 percentage points on many benchmarks .

Bottom Line

• Claude Opus 4.8 / Fable 5 is the strongest all-around alternative to GPT today .
• Gemini 3.1 Pro leads on reasoning and math benchmarks .
• GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 still dominate coding (SWE-bench) and agentic desktop tasks .
• Open-weight models like DeepSeek V4 and Qwen3-Max are closing the gap rapidly .

No single model is strictly "better than GPT" for everything. The frontier has diversified, and the best model for you depends on your specific use case.