OpenAI has officially rolled out its new GPT-4.1 series, including GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano, to ChatGPT users. The company says that the new models bring notable upgrades in coding, instruction following, and long-context comprehension. “These models outperform GPT4o and GPT4o mini across the board, with major gains in coding and instruction following,” OpenAI wrote on its blog post.
Access to these models on ChatGPT will only be available to paying users. In a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) on May 14, OpenAI confirmed that its latest flagship model, GPT-4.1, is now live on ChatGPT. The announcement follows a broader launch of the GPT 4.1 family on OpenAI’s API platform a month ago, where developers can already integrate and test the three versions — full, mini, and nano. However, with the latest update, the models are now available to all ChatGPT users, except free users.
OpenAI claims that the GPT-4.1 significantly outperforms its predecessor GPT-4o in areas like coding and instruction following. The model is designed with a larger context window, which supports up to 1 million tokens. This means that it can process and retain more information at once. It also comes with a knowledge cutoff of June 2024. GPT 4o’s knowledge cutoff is October 2023.
OpenAI has shared benchmarks on its official blog post, that claims that the GPT-4.1 shows a 21 per cent absolute improvement over GPT-4o in software engineering tasks and is 10.5 per cent better in instruction following. OpenAI says the model is now much better at maintaining coherent conversations across multiple turns, making it more effective for real-world applications such as writing assistance, software development, and customer support. “While benchmarks provide valuable insights, we trained these models with a focus on real-world utility. Close collaboration and partnership with the developer community enabled us to optimise these models for the tasks that matter most to their applications,” OpenAI says. The mini and nano variants are scaled-down versions aimed at offering high performance with lower cost and latency. GPT-4.1 mini is reported to reduce latency by nearly half while costing 83 per cent less than GPT-4o.