On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the release of its newest multimodal AI model, GPT-4.1. This milestone is indeed a huge step in the company’s journey to create what it terms an “agentic software engineer.” This new machine learning model significantly increases the speed and precision of code creation. It provides developers with a powerful new tool powered by a larger context window and enhanced performance benchmarks.
Or, you can access GPT-4.1 through OpenAI’s API. It boasts a phenomenal one-million-token context window, so it can potentially take in about 750,000 words of text in one go. This new capability opens up so many more powerful and fascinating ways for developers to interact with the model. Users need to be aware that GPT-4.1 takes prompts more literally than GPT-4o. That can mean you have to provide more specific directions to achieve the desired output.
Even with such highly developed features, GPT-4.1’s reliability is likely to decrease with more input tokens. This feature is a reminder of the need for specificity in prompts, particularly when working with large batches of data. The overall cost structure for utilizing GPT-4.1 is interesting as well. To compare, the base model costs $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens. If you’re seeking more budget-friendly alternatives, explore GPT-4.1 mini. It’s a mere $0.40 per million input tokens and $1.60 per million output tokens. Aside from the GPT-4.1 nano, the new turbo model is OpenAI’s fastest and cheapest yet. It’s fully $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens.
On the performance side, GPT-4.1 has set new state-of-the-art results on a majority of existing coding benchmarks. It only scored 52% to 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench’s human-validated subset of SWE-bench. This very strong performance outperformed the capabilities of both the GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini models in programming tasks. GPT-4.1 did spectacularly well, with 72% accuracy, in the “long, no subtitles” video category. This milestone emphasizes its astounding capabilities that go far beyond classic coding chores.
The development of GPT-4.1 reflects OpenAI’s commitment to enhancing user experience based on direct feedback from developers in the field. An OpenAI spokesperson noted, “We’ve optimized GPT-4.1 for real-world use based on direct feedback to improve in areas that developers care most about: frontend coding, making fewer extraneous edits, following formats reliably, adhering to response structure and ordering, consistent tool usage, and more.” This statement underscores OpenAI’s overall commitment to deployment, or more simply, use cases for their technology.
Among the most notable aspects of GPT-4.1 is its knowledge cut-off date of June 2024. This nomadic lifestyle lets users stay on top of the newest and coolest knowledge and developments from a wide range of industries and disciplines. This is really important for developers — they need accurate data and informed context to shape their solutions to the specific needs of their communities.
OpenAI has already released three different variants of GPT-4.1 with standard, mini and nano versions. This diversity provides consumers with multiple ways to tailor their experience to their individual preferences and willingness to pay. Each iteration builds on basics and/or adds new bells and whistles, with different speeds and price points, stretching the product’s reach to more people.
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