GPT-4.1, the company’s follow-up to the GPT-4o multimodal AI model, was unveiled by OpenAI last year. OpenAI claimed during a webcast on Monday that GPT-4.1 is superior to GPT-4o in “just about every dimension,” including coding and command following, and has an even wider context window.
Developers may now access GPT-4.1 and two smaller model variants. These include the even more lightweight GPT-4.1 Nano, which OpenAI claims is its “smallest, fastest, and cheapest” model to date, and the GPT-4.1 Mini, which is, like its predecessor, more reasonably priced for developers to experiment with.
Up to one million tokens of context, such as the text, pictures, or videos that are part of a prompt, can be processed by any one of the three models. That is a lot more than the 128,000 token cap on GPT-4o. In an article revealing the models, OpenAI states, “We trained GPT‑4.1 to reliably attend to information across the full 1 million context length.” Additionally, it has been trained to be significantly more accurate than GPT-4o at identifying pertinent content and ignoring distractions for both short and long context lengths.
Additionally, GPT 4.1 is 26% less expensive than GPT-4o, a parameter that has gained significance since DeepSeek’s incredibly effective AI model was introduced.
The launch coincides with OpenAI’s announcement in a changelog that GPT-4o is a “natural successor” to its two-year-old GPT-4 model, which it intends to phase out from ChatGPT on April 30th. Given that “GPT-4.1 offers improved or similar performance on many key capabilities at much lower cost and latency,” OpenAI also intends to deprecate the GPT-4.5 preview in the API on July 14.
In order to prevent its GPUs from “melting,” OpenAI had to restrict requests and suspend access to free ChatGPT accounts after updating GPT-4o, the default model in ChatGPT, last month to provide additional image-generation capabilities.
The GPT-4.1 announcement represents a change in OpenAI’s release timetable and validates our information from last week that the business is getting ready to introduce new models. CEO Sam Altman revealed on X on April 4th that the GPT-5 launch was being postponed and will now take place “in a few months,” which is later than the previously anticipated May target. According to Altman, OpenAI “found it harder than we thought it was going to be to smoothly integrate everything,” which is one reason for the delay.
The full version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model and an o4 micro reasoning model are expected to be released soon; AI engineer Tibor Blaho has already noticed references to them in the most recent ChatGPT web release.