Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- OpenAI is easing restrictions on GPT-5.6’s usage limits and cutting out 5-hour windows.
- A company executive recently said GPT-5.6 optimizations give ChatGPT users 10% additional usage.
- The team is also working on optimizing usage with ChatGPT Work and multi-agent workflows.
As with every major feature release from OpenAI, the new GPT-5.6 models have already been overused beyond expectation. The models are officially reported to have reached 6 million active ChatGPT users, but instead of crippling them with limits as Google did, OpenAI is rewarding them with faster usage resets.
In a post on X, Thibault Sottiaux (Tibo), OpenAI’s newly appointed head of core products, announced the temporary removal of the 5-hour usage limit restriction, but only for Plus, Business, and Pro users. That should mean you can burn through your entire week’s limit if you want to.
In a separate post, Tibo also addressed concerns about excessive usage and said the team is experimenting with different reasoning efforts (or juice values), especially in multi-agent scenarios. While the reasoning capability was briefly reduced as part of a test, it has been reverted to its original value.
A couple of other changes for unrestricted use include:
- context size limit being shrunk back to 272,000 tokens (down from 372k) to reduce usage
- inference optimizations resulting in 10% extra usage with GPT-5.6 Sol
OpenAI recently launched its GPT-5.6 family of AI models after a short preview window. These models come in three different forms: Sol, Terra, and Luna, with varying performance and compute requirements. Of the trio, GPT‑5.6 Sol is the most formidable and is intended for demanding chores, such as coding, creative design, and deeper analyses. Luna is designed for cost-efficient tasks, despite which it is claimed to outperform Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and 5. Meanwhile, Terra offers a balance between the two.
Along with announcing these models, OpenAI has also released its answer to Claude Cowork. It’s called ChatGPT Work, and it works similarly by gathering context from across apps and services on your desktop or in a web browser and coordinating the tasks required to achieve your professional goals for you (even though there’s nothing stopping it from helping with your personal ones, either). Along with this announcement, OpenAI has upgraded the standalone Codex app and merged it with ChatGPT Work.
These new abilities have led to record-breaking usage among ChatGPT users, which is why today’s announcement sounds welcome.
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