Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark

simonwillison.net

Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark. OpenAI announced a partnership with Cerebras on January 14th. Four weeks later they're already launching the first integration, "an ultra-fast model for real-time coding in Codex".

Despite being named GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark it's not purely an accelerated alternative to GPT-5.3-Codex - the blog post calls it "a smaller version of GPT‑5.3-Codex" and clarifies that "at launch, Codex-Spark has a 128k context window and is text-only."

I had some preview access to this model and I can confirm that it's significantly faster than their other models.

Here's what that speed looks like running in Codex CLI:

That was the "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt - here's the rendered result:

Whimsical flat illustration of an orange duck merged with a bicycle, where the duck's body forms the seat and frame area while its head extends forward over the handlebars, set against a simple light blue sky and green grass background.

Compare that to the speed of regular GPT-5.3 Codex medium:

Significantly slower, but the pelican is a lot better:

Whimsical flat illustration of a white pelican riding a dark blue bicycle at speed, with motion lines behind it, its long orange beak streaming back in the wind, set against a light blue sky and green grass background.

What's interesting about this model isn't the quality though, it's the speed. When a model responds this fast you can stay in flow state and iterate with the model much more productively.

I showed a demo of Cerebras running Llama 3.1 70 B at 2,000 tokens/second against Val Town back in October 2024. OpenAI claim 1,000 tokens/second for their new model, and I expect it will prove to be a ferociously useful partner for hands-on iterative coding sessions.

It's not yet clear what the pricing will look like for this new model.

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Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark