System card: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/3a4153c8-c748-4b71-8e31-aecbde944...
This (and the price increase) points to a new pretrained model under-the-hood.
GPT-5.1, in contrast, was allegedly using the same pretraining as GPT-4o.
(Also not sure how that would work, but maybe I’ve missed a paper or two!)
But it's just semantics.