All modelsOpenAI GPT-4.1
OpenAI GPT-4.1 is the latest iteration in the GPT series, specifically designed with developers in mind, offering significant advancements in coding, instruction following, and long-context processing. Available exclusively via API, GPT-4.1 aims to enhance the productivity of developers and power more capable AI agents and applications.
Intended Use
Software development (code generation, debugging, testing, code diffs)
Building AI agents and automating complex workflows
Analyzing and processing large documents and codebases (up to 1M tokens)
Tasks requiring precise instruction following and structured outputs
Multimodal applications involving text and image inputs
Performance
GPT-4.1 introduces a massive 1 million token input context window, a substantial increase over previous models, enabling it to process and reason over extremely large texts or datasets in a single prompt. This significantly improves performance on long-context tasks, including document analysis and multi-hop reasoning.
The model demonstrates notable improvements in coding performance, scoring 54.6% on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark and showing higher accuracy in generating code diffs compared to its predecessors. It is also specifically tuned for better instruction following, showing improved adherence to complex, multi-step directions and reduced misinterpretations on benchmarks like MultiChallenge and IFEval.
GPT-4.1 maintains multimodal capabilities, accepting text and image inputs. It has shown strong performance on multimodal benchmarks, including those involving visual question answering on charts, diagrams, and even extracting information from videos without subtitles. The model is also highlighted for its 100% accuracy on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval across its entire 1M token context window.
Available in a family of models including GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini (optimized for balance of performance and cost), and GPT-4.1 nano (optimized for speed and cost), GPT-4.1 offers flexibility for various developer needs and aims for improved cost-efficiency compared to earlier models like GPT-4o for many use cases.
Limitations
API-only availability: Unlike some previous GPT models, GPT-4.1 is currently available exclusively through the API and is not directly accessible in the ChatGPT consumer interface.
Rate limits: While offering a large context window, practical usage for extremely high-volume or continuous long-context tasks can be impacted by API rate limits, which vary by usage tier.
Reasoning specialization: While demonstrating improved reasoning, GPT-4.1 is not primarily positioned as a dedicated reasoning model in the same category as some models specifically optimized for deep, step-by-step logical deduction.
Potential for "laziness" in smaller variants: Some initial user observations have suggested that the smallest variant, GPT-4.1 nano, can occasionally exhibit a tendency for shorter or less detailed responses, potentially requiring more specific prompting.
Multimodal output: While accepting text and image inputs, the primary output modality is text; it does not generate images directly like some other multimodal models.