Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased that he was dropping a new feature. Paired with reports and spottings of new model art, many speculated it was the long-awaited release of the GPT-4.1 model. It turned out to be a massive ChatGPT update that introduced new memory capabilities -- but now, OpenAI's new family of models has finally arrived.

New family of models - for developers

On Monday via a livestream, OpenAI unveiled a new family of models: GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano. According to OpenAI, the family of models offers improvements in coding, instruction-following, and long-context understanding, and outperforms GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini "across the board."

The models were purpose-built for developers and, as a result, will only be available via the API. 

Also: OpenAI used to test its AI models for months - now it's days. Why that matters

OpenAI says the GPT-4.1 models were built using developer feedback to improve areas they are particularly focused on, such as following reliable formats, adhering to response structure and order, front-end coding, and more. In the X post teasing the release, OpenAI referred to the model as addressing developers' "supermassive black hole."

One of the biggest advantages of the models is its reduced latency (lag) even with higher performance on intelligence evaluations, such as the Multilingual (MMLU) benchmark, seen below. 

Also: ChatGPT's GPT-4 model retires soon - some users can continue to access it

Despite these benefits, the models are also cost-effective, addressing a major pain point for developers.

OpenAI shared that GPT-4.1 is 26% less expensive than GPT-4o at median queries, and GPT-4.1 is the fastest and cheapest model the company has launched to date. Furthermore, GPT-4.1 mini reduces costs by 83%, according to the blog post. 

Other advantages include larger context windows, which refer to the amount of tokens (pieces of information) the model can process as input and output. The GPT-4.1 models support up to one million tokens. For reference, the o1 and o3-mini models in the API have a 200K context length, and GPT-4.5 and GPT-4o have a 128K context length.

Also: How to use ChatGPT: A beginner's guide to the most popular AI chatbot

OpenAI says the long context comprehension, paired with improvements in instruction-following, make the GPT-4.1 models "more effective" at powering AI agents, the latest frontier in AI. Simply put, AI agents are AI systems that can do tasks for you independently without being instructed on how to carry out every individual step. 

To learn more about how the new models fare against the previous models across different benchmarks and specific use cases, visit the detailed blog post in which OpenAI provided the results. 

Since the new models offer similar or improved performance at a lower cost than GPT-4.5, the company also announced it is deprecating GPT-4.5 and focusing on building future models. To give developers ample time to transition, GPT-4.5 Preview will be turned off on July 14, 2025. 

Not a developer? Try GPT-4o

If you're a typical ChatGPT user and not a developer, there's no need to be disappointed. 

Also: ChatGPT's GPT-4 model retires soon - some users can continue to access it

Although the new GPT-4.1 models will not be available within the ChatGPT model picker, the latest version of GPT-4o in the chatbot includes many of the same improvements, as seen in the changelog description for the March 27 update.

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