OpenAI is releasing its GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini AI models in ChatGPT, the company announced in a post on X Wednesday.
The GPT-4.1 models should help software engineers who are using ChatGPT to write or debug code, OpenAI spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo told TechCrunch. GPT-4.1 excels at coding and instruction following compared to GPT-4o, according to OpenAI, but is faster than its o-series of reasoning models.
The company says it’s now rolling out GPT-4.1 to subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team. Meanwhile, OpenAI is releasing GPT-4.1 mini for free and paying users of ChatGPT. As a result of this update, OpenAI is removing GPT-4.0 mini from ChatGPT for all users, the company notes in GPT-4.1’s release notes.
OpenAI launched GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini in April, but only released the models through its developer-facing API. At the time, the company faced criticism from the AI research community for shipping GPT-4.1 without a safety report. These researchers claimed OpenAI was lowering its standards around transparency into its AI models. However, OpenAI argued at the time that — despite GPT-4.1’s improved performance and speed compared to GPT-4o — this model was not a frontier model, and thus did not require the same safety reporting that more capable models do.
“GPT-4.1 doesn’t introduce new modalities or ways of interacting with the model, and doesn’t surpass o3 in intelligence,” said OpenAI’s Head of Safety Systems Johannes Heidecke in a post on X Wednesday. “This means that the safety considerations here, while substantial, are different from frontier models.”
Now, OpenAI is releasing more information about GPT-4.1 and all its AI models. Earlier on Wednesday, OpenAI committed to publish the results of its internal AI model safety evaluations more frequently as part of an effort to increase transparency. Those results will live in OpenAI’s new Safety Evaluations Hub, which it launched on Wednesday.
The release of GPT-4.1 in ChatGPT comes at a time when there’s increased attention on AI coding tools. OpenAI is reportedly nearing the announcement of its $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf, one of the most popular AI coding tools on the market. Earlier on Wednesday, Google updated its Gemini chatbot to connect more easily to GitHub projects.
