OpenAI Releases GPT-4.1 With More Focus On Software Engineering Work

GPT-4.1 brings major improvements in coding, instruction following, and support for up to 1 million tokens of context (roughly 750,000 words).

OpenAI has just launched its latest AI model, GPT-4.1, along with two smaller variants: GPT-4.1 Mini and GPT-4.1 Nano. This new generation of GPT models brings major improvements in coding, instruction following, and support for up to 1 million tokens of context (roughly 750,000 words).

All three models come with a refreshed knowledge cutoff of June 2024

But why three models?

The decision to create three models was driven by the need to cater to different developer requirements across various dimensions, such as intelligence, speed, and cost.

• GPT 4.1: This is the powerhouse of the three models and is recommended as the starting point. It excels in coding, complex instruction following, and handling long context. It is better than GPT4o in almost every dimension and even meets or beats GPT 4.5 in several key areas.

• GPT 4.1 Mini: This model is recommended if you need something faster for potentially slightly simpler use cases. It offers a balance between performance, speed, and cost. It punches above its weight in multimodal reasoning and intelligence, potentially being the top model for multimodal or image processing.

• GPT 4.1 Nano: This is OpenAI’s smallest, fastest, and cheapest model ever. It is positioned as a workhorse for a high volume of applications like autocomplete, classification, and extracting information from long documents. Despite being faster and cheaper, it still handles up to a million tokens of context.

Take a look at the latency curve below, which shows the performance of the GPT-4.1 models against the GPT-4o models.