OpenAI releases GPT-4.1 API: Million-token context and price cuts shake up the game
OpenAI just dropped what might be its biggest update yet, making GPT-4.1 available to all developers through its API today. After months of anticipation and some reported delays, the AI powerhouse has delivered on CEO Sam Altman’s promises while addressing two pain points that have long frustrated developers: context limitations and high costs.
The million-token milestone
The headline feature? GPT-4.1’s massive 1,000,000 token context window. To put that in perspective, you could feed the entire text of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” into a single prompt and still have room to spare.
“GPT-4.1 was specifically trained to maintain reliable attention across its full context length without losing track of information,” an OpenAI spokesperson explained.
Early testing suggests the model performs admirably with extensive documents, though there’s a catch: accuracy does begin to degrade at extreme lengths, dropping from approximately 84% at 8K tokens to around 50% at the full 1M token capacity. Still, that’s impressive territory few other mainstream AIs have ventured into.
Three models, three price points
Breaking with tradition, OpenAI is launching three distinct variants:
- GPT-4.1 (base): The flagship model pushing the boundaries of what AI can do
- GPT-4.1 mini: A balanced offering maintaining the 1M token context at a more accessible price point
- GPT-4.1 nano: OpenAI’s first “nano” model, prioritizing speed and cost-effectiveness
All three variants support multimodal capabilities (accepting both text and image inputs). OpenAI claims GPT-4.1’s image understanding capabilities often outperform the original GPT-4 on vision benchmarks.
Are these price cuts for real?
Perhaps the most surprising aspect is OpenAI’s aggressive pricing strategy. GPT-4.1 costs approximately 26% lower than GPT-4o for median queries:
| Model | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-4.1 (base) | $2.00/M tokens | $8.00/M tokens |
| GPT-4.1 mini | $0.40/M tokens | $1.60/M tokens |
| GPT-4.1 nano | $0.10/M tokens | $0.40/M tokens |
The company has also increased its prompt caching discount to 75% and offers an additional 50% reduction for batch API requests.
Performance that makes developers take notice
Beyond the flashy headline features, GPT-4.1 delivers substantial improvements in several key areas:
- Coding prowess: A 21.4 percentage point improvement on the SWE-Bench Verified coding test compared to GPT-4o
- Instruction following: A 10.5 point gain on Scale AI’s MultiChallenge benchmark
- Knowledge base: Updated training data through June 2024
“We’ve optimized GPT-4.1 based on real-world feedback,” an OpenAI representative noted. “It addresses many of the ‘papercuts’ developers experienced with previous models.”
Where’s ChatGPT in all this?
Notably absent from today’s announcement is integration with OpenAI’s consumer-facing product. The company confirmed that at launch, GPT-4.1 is “API-only and not in ChatGPT yet,” with consumer product integration expected later.
This staggered approach makes sense given Altman’s previous cautions about potential delays due to GPU capacity issues.
Developer feedback
Early developer feedback has been largely positive, with particular enthusiasm around the expanded context window and improved coding capabilities. “The function calling is way more reliable now,” one developer wrote. “It actually follows the schema I give it without going off-script.”
But not everyone’s fully convinced. Some have expressed skepticism about the practical utility of the full 1M token context, noting performance degradation at extreme lengths. Others have voiced frustration with the June 2024 knowledge cutoff.
What’s next
GPT-4.1 represents a significant milestone in OpenAI’s journey toward what one spokesperson described as an “agentic software engineer” AI. With its improved tool usage, function calling capabilities, and reasoning abilities, the model is positioned to serve as the backbone for increasingly sophisticated AI agents.
As AI capabilities continue to advance at breakneck speed, GPT-4.1 establishes itself as OpenAI’s new flagship offering—smarter, more flexible, and more accessible than ever before. The bar for what we expect from AI just got raised again.