OpenAI's ChatGPT Gets The GPT-4.1 Models, Which Excel 'At Coding Tasks And Instruction Following'

Minor but packs a punch. That's what it is.

When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT and disrupted the AI industry, others quickly followed with their own solutions. As the competition continues and things become fierce, one thing is certain: large language models are becoming smarter and more capable.

And here, OpenAI releases 'GPT-4.1.'

As the successor of the already-powerful GPT-4, the company said that the newer version "is a specialized model that excels at coding tasks and instruction following. Because it’s faster, it’s a great alternative to OpenAI o3 and o4 mini for everyday coding needs."

Alongside it, the company also releases 'GPT-4.1 mini,' and 'GPT-4.1 nano.'

In the announcement on its website, OpenAI said that:

According to OpenAI, both GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini are fine-tuned to excel at coding and task instruction—delivering better performance than GPT-4o and its mini counterpart "across the board."

A standout feature is their expanded 1 million token context window, which significantly surpasses GPT-4o’s 128,000-token limit, allowing developers to feed the models far more extensive text, code, and multimedia prompts.

OpenAI also highlights notable speed enhancements, making GPT-4.1 particularly well-suited for daily programming needs—offering a smoother experience than the o3 and o4 mini models, which were introduced earlier in April for advanced reasoning capabilities.

Both GPT-4.1 models were made available to developers back in April, launched alongside GPT-4.1 nano—a compact model described by OpenAI as its "smallest, fastest, and cheapest" to date.

Just one day before unveiling the GPT-4.1 family of models, OpenAI launched its new Safety Evaluations Hub—a dedicated platform that offers transparent performance metrics across its AI lineup.

According to the hub, GPT-4.1 delivers consistently strong results across a wide range of evaluation benchmarks, outperforming many of its predecessors. It also excels in long-context tasks, demonstrating a strong ability to retrieve and synthesize information spread across large inputs—an increasingly vital capability in real-world applications.

However, when it comes to jailbreak resistance testing, GPT-4.1 slightly trails behind models like GPT-4o mini and o3, suggesting a trade-off between capability and vulnerability in some edge cases.

Meanwhile, GPT-4.1 mini stands out by offering comparable intelligence to GPT-4o but with faster performance and drastically reduced costs—cutting expenses by as much as 83%, according to OpenAI. It’s positioned as a more efficient alternative for developers who need speed and budget-friendliness without compromising much on the performance.

As for GPT-4.1 nano, the lightest and most efficient model in the series, it was absent from the official rollout update. Designed for lightweight tasks such as text classification and autocomplete, nano may not have been front and center, but OpenAI reports that it still ranks well in intelligence benchmarks despite its compact size.