Wow this is incredible.
OpenAI’s new GPT 4.1 model blows almost every other model out of the water — including GPT 4.5 (terrible naming I know).
It’s not even close — just look at what GPT 4o and GPT 4.1 produced for the exact same prompt:
❌ Before: GPT 4o
Prompt:
Make a flashcard web application.
The user should be able to create flashcards, search through their existing flashcards, review flashcards, and see statistics on flashcards reviewed.
Preload ten cards containing a Hindi word or phrase and its English translation.
Review interface: In the review interface, clicking or pressing Space should flip the card with a smooth 3-D animation to reveal the translation. Pressing the arrow keys should navigate through cards.
Search interface: The search bar should dynamically provide a list of results as the user types in a query.
Statistics interface: The stats page should show a graph of the number of cards the user has reviewed, and the percentage they have gotten correct.
Create cards interface: The create cards page should allow the user to specify the front and back of a flashcard and add to the user’s collection. Each of these interfaces should be accessible in the sidebar. Generate a single page React app (put all styles inline).
✅ Now look at what GPT 4.1 produced for the same prompt:
The 4.1 version is just way better in every way:
- ✅ Cleaner and more intuitive inputs
- ✅ Better feedback with the user
- ✅ Polished UI with icons and color
It’s a massive improvement — which is why IDEs like Windsurf and Cursor quickly added GPT 4.1 support just a few hours after its release.
Major GPT-4.1 enhancements
1 million
GPT 4.1 has a breakthrough 1 million token context window.
Way higher than the previous 128,000 token limit GPT 4o could handle.
So now the model can process and understand much larger inputs:
- Extensive documents
- Complex codebases — leading to even more powerful coding agents
GPT 4.1 will digest the content well enough to focus on the relevant information and disregard any distractions.
Just better in every way
GPT-4.1 has proven to be better than 4o and 4.5 in just about every benchmark
How great at coding?
54.6% on SWE-bench Verified Benchmark
- 21.4% absolute improvement over GPT-4o
- 26.6% absolute improvement over GPT-4.5.
Instruction following
Scored 38.3% on the Scale’s MultiChallenge benchmark
- 10.5% absolute increase over GPT-4o
Long-context comprehension
Sets a new state-of-the-art with a 72.0% score on the Video-MME benchmark’s long, no subtitles category.
- 6.7% absolute increase over GPT-4o
Cheaper too
Greater intelligence for a fraction of the cost. GPT-4.1 is also 26% more cost-effective than GPT-4o.
A significant decrease — which you’ll definitely feel in an AI app with many thousands of users bombarding the API every minute.
Not like most of us will ever get to such levels of scale, ha ha.
Meet Mini and Nano
OpenAI also released two streamlined versions of GPT-4.1:
GPT-4.1 Mini
Mini still gives GPT-4o a run for its money, but better:
- 50% less latency
- 83% cheaper
GPT-4.1 Nano
The smallest, fastest, and most affordable model.
Perfect at low-latency tasks like classification and autocompletion.
And despite being so small, it still achieves impressive scores and outperforms GPT-4o Mini:
- 80.1% on MMLU
- 50.3% on GPQA
- 9.8% on Aider polyglot coding
Evolution doesn’t stop
GPT-4 was once the talk of the town — but today it’s on its way out.
With GPT-4.1, OpenAI OpenAI plans to phase out older models:
- GPT-4: Scheduled to be retired from ChatGPT by April 30, 2025.
- GPT-4.5 Preview: Set to be deprecated in the API by July 14, 2025.
Yes even GPT-4.5 that just came out a few weeks ago is going away soon.
Right now GPT-4.1 is only available in the API for developers and enterprise users.
GPT-5 might be delayed but OpenAI isn’t slowing down.
GPT-4.1 is a big step up—smarter, faster, cheaper, and able to handle way more context. It sets a fresh standard and opens the door for what’s coming next.