GPT-4.1 Model Introduction

   GPT-4.1 is the latest model released by OpenAI.As a milestone in the evolution of its AI technology, the model has achieved significant improvements in core areas such as coding ability, instruction following, and long-context understanding. At the same time, OpenAI also launched lightweight versions GPT-4.1 mini and GPT-4.1 nano, which are aimed at the needs of developers in different scenarios. Although these two derivative models excel in cost and efficiency, GPT-4.1 is still the core focus of this release with its comprehensive technical upgrades and industry-leading comprehensive performance. OpenAI's ambitious goal for GPT-4.1 is to create an [agentic software engineer] who can independently complete software development tasks like a human engineer.

Highlights

1. Long text processing capabilities lead the industry

GPT-4.1 supports context windows of up to 1,000,000 tokens, a significant improvement over GPT-4o's 128,000 tokens. This also allows the model to process very long text or complete code projects at once, and developers can directly input the entire package of project files for debugging or reconstruction, avoiding truncation of content and improving efficiency.

2. The program code is more accurate and the output is more stable

GPT-4.1 has significantly improved its programming performance. According to OpenAI's internal tests, in the front-end development scenario, it has reduced the number of unnecessary edits from 9% to 2%. It not only supports code generation and error correction, but also can be combined with AI Agent technology to build automated workflows. Front-end development practice: When generating web applications, human reviewers are more inclined to choose GPT-4.1's code in a comparative test of 80%, and its functional completeness and interface aesthetics have been significantly improved.

3. The ability to follow instructions has been significantly improved

By optimizing multi-round dialogue understanding and complex instruction parsing, GPT-4.1 performs well in the following scenarios: Scale's MultiChallenge benchmark test: score 38.3%, an increase of 10.5% over GPT-4o (27.8%), verifying its ability to maintain contextual coherence in multi-round interactions. Format control and negative instructions: In the internal hard task evaluation, the accuracy rate was 49.1% (GPT-4o was 29.2%), and the probability of avoiding redundant modifications dropped from 9% to 2%. In addition, GPT-4.1 is more accurate in understanding the latter part of the instructions in a long context, further enhancing its stability and accuracy in application scenarios such as chatbots and virtual assistants.

4. More affordable and suitable for large-scale applications

Although the performance has been improved, the API cost of GPT-4.1 is reduced by an average of about 20% compared to GPT-4o. The Mini and Nano versions are more cost-effective, allowing enterprises and start-up teams to introduce AI technology with a more affordable budget and create smart applications.

Comparison between GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 and Claude 3.7: Which one is the first choice for enterprises?

   Despite its outstanding performance, GPT-4.1 faces fierce competition from Google and Anthropic. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro seizes high-end application scenarios with its [powerful thinking and reasoning capabilities] and Google ecosystem integration, and its context window and leading position in reasoning benchmarks such as GPQA pose a direct challenge. Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet stands out with its unique hybrid reasoning mode, leading code capabilities on SWE-Bench (70.3%) and clear [Constitutional AI] security framework.An enterprise's choice of model depends more on comprehensive consideration of application task characteristics, ecological preferences and cost budget.

   Although GPT-4.1 mini and nano provide cost-effective options for lightweight needs, GPT-4.1 is still a concentrated reflection of OpenAI's technical strength, especially its reliability in complex tasks, making it the first choice for enterprise-level applications. With the GPT-4.5 preview version discontinued in July 2025, developers can seamlessly migrate to GPT-4.1 to explore cutting-edge scenarios such as automated agents and multimodal analysis, further unleashing the productivity potential of AI.