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ChatGPT-4.0 vs. ChatGPT-4.1: Complete Comparison. Performance, Features, Pricing, and Real-World Differences

Updated: Jul 25



ChatGPT-4.1 is a major advancement over GPT-4.0, offering substantial improvements in coding ability, reasoning, and instruction-following, along with enhanced performance, speed, and reliability.
With a dramatically larger context window, GPT-4.1 can process and recall information from much longer documents or entire codebases, while its reduced API and subscription costs make advanced AI more accessible to professionals and developers.
New features, integrations, and tool support expand the model’s capabilities, delivering more precise, literal answers that are especially useful for technical, business, and multi-step tasks—though users should be mindful of the model’s increased literalness, growing model selection options, and a few remaining limitations.
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Performance Improvements

  • Coding and accuracy: GPT-4.1 dramatically improves on GPT-4o in coding tasks. On major software engineering benchmarks, GPT-4.1 completes significantly more tasks than GPT-4o, with absolute gains above 20%. Human evaluators also strongly prefer code generated by GPT-4.1, and it produces much more reliable code-diff outputs for editing large files. Overall, GPT-4.1 is now regarded as one of the top coding models available.

  • Instruction following: GPT-4.1 is notably better at following complex, multi-step instructions. On instruction benchmarks, it outperforms GPT-4o by over 10% and extracts relevant information from prior context more reliably. In practice, this means GPT-4.1 yields cleaner, more precise answers with fewer misunderstandings. It has been tuned to be more literal, so users should give clear, explicit prompts for best results.

  • Long-context handling: GPT-4.1 expands the context window to up to 1,000,000 tokens—much greater than GPT-4o’s 128k token limit. This allows it to process whole books, codebases, or lengthy documents with better recall and understanding. Its training enables it to attend across long contexts, focusing on relevant information while ignoring distractions.

  • Speed and efficiency: The GPT-4.1 model family pushes performance across the latency curve. The “mini” variant achieves near GPT-4o accuracy while halving latency and reducing API costs by over 80%. The “nano” variant is even faster and more cost-effective for lightweight tasks. GPT-4.1 models are up to 4–10 times cheaper than GPT-4o for similar performance. Lower latency and cost mean faster, more reliable responses for most users.

  • Reliability: GPT-4.1 has a lower hallucination and error rate compared to GPT-4o. On factual Q&A and content safety tests, it outperforms its predecessors. However, like all large language models, it can still be vulnerable to adversarial prompts. In everyday use—especially for coding and multi-step tasks—GPT-4.1 is more dependable than GPT-4o, though users should still verify critical outputs.



New Features and Capabilities

  • Larger context window: All GPT-4.1 variants support up to 1,000,000 tokens of input, allowing processing of entire books or codebases at once. This major upgrade helps for analysis of large documents, logs, and research materials.

  • Tools and integrations: GPT-4.1 works seamlessly with OpenAI’s new agent tools and “Responses API,” enabling direct integration with web search, file search, and code execution. Developers can call web-search and code libraries as part of GPT-4.1’s reasoning. It also supports image generation, background/asynchronous mode, and auditability features via the Responses API, and it connects to external knowledge/tools using new protocols.

  • Memory handling: Around the time of GPT-4.1’s release, ChatGPT’s “memory” feature was upgraded: it can now remember all past user conversations (if enabled), allowing more personalized and contextualized suggestions. Separately, GPT-4.1’s extended context acts as a form of short-term memory for large input sequences.

  • ChatGPT integrations: The ChatGPT interface now offers GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini as model options for Plus, Pro, and Team users, with mini as the new default for free users. ChatGPT also supports new data connectors (e.g., Dropbox, GitHub) for retrieving documents or code into the chat, making GPT-4.1 a more powerful assistant for development and research workflows.



Reasoning and Coding Abilities

  • Coding proficiency: GPT-4.1’s coding skills surpass GPT-4.0, especially on code-diff and code generation tasks. Its output token limit is doubled, supporting larger codebase edits. It writes cleaner, more reliable code with fewer extraneous changes and has been trained to produce more functional and polished solutions in practical web development scenarios. For developers, GPT-4.1 is now considered a top choice for coding help.

  • Reasoning and multi-step tasks: GPT-4.1 is tuned for more direct, literal instruction-following than GPT-4o. On multi-step and reasoning benchmarks, it performs very well, but often skips irrelevant steps and produces concise, targeted answers. This makes it especially effective for factual Q&A and technical tasks, though users may need to prompt more specifically for creative or open-ended reasoning. In extended dialogues, GPT-4.1 is better at tracking context and maintaining task focus.

  • Benchmarks and examples: Across many standard and real-world benchmarks, GPT-4.1 outperforms GPT-4o—sometimes dramatically. For example, it is much more accurate on complex regulatory, legal, or SQL tasks, and handles schema selection and step-by-step logic more robustly. These gains translate into fewer mistakes in practical, multi-step workflows.



API Differences (Availability, Pricing, IDs, Feedback)

  • Availability: GPT-4.1 models (flagship, mini, nano) launched on the API in April 2025 and were rolled out in ChatGPT for paid users in May 2025. Free users now access GPT-4.1 mini as the default advanced model. Rate limits are unchanged from GPT-4o.

  • Pricing: GPT-4.1 is significantly cheaper than GPT-4o. API pricing is now $2.00 per 1,000 input tokens and $8.00 per 1,000 output tokens, versus GPT-4o’s $5.00/$20.00. The mini and nano variants are even cheaper. For ChatGPT Plus users, there is no change in monthly subscription price—just access to a higher-performing model.

  • Model identifiers: API model IDs for GPT-4.1 are gpt-4.1, gpt-4.1-mini, and gpt-4.1-nano. The ChatGPT UI lists these models accordingly. GPT-4.1 mini has replaced GPT-4o mini as the fallback model for all users.

  • Developer feedback: Early adopters praise GPT-4.1’s improved coding, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. Some note subtle differences in style compared to GPT-4o-latest (the constantly updated ChatGPT model), and that feeding extremely large inputs can still cause performance drops. The larger number of model choices is sometimes seen as confusing, but overall sentiment is positive regarding GPT-4.1’s faster, higher-quality answers for many use cases.



Known Limitations and Bugs

  • Not available for free users at launch: GPT-4.1 was initially API-only and then rolled out to paid ChatGPT users. Free-tier users get GPT-4.1 mini after using their GPT-3.5 allocation. Enterprise and educational accounts are also on a delayed rollout.

  • Complex model lineup: The introduction of GPT-4.1 adds to the growing number of GPT-4 variants (GPT-4o, GPT-4.0, GPT-4.5 preview, GPT-4.1, mini/nano), which some users find confusing when selecting models in ChatGPT.

  • Multimodality: Unlike GPT-4o, which had vision-enabled versions, GPT-4.1 is primarily a language/coding model and does not currently support image or video input. It is focused on text and code.

  • Literalness: GPT-4.1’s increased literalness in following instructions means vague prompts may yield incomplete answers. Users should specify style or format more explicitly for best results.

  • Adversarial safety: While GPT-4.1 is strong on normal content filters, it is still susceptible to certain adversarial “jailbreak” prompts. In practice, this means some clever attacks can still trigger undesired outputs.

  • Known bugs: Early reports mentioned occasional handling issues (like file input or character encoding glitches), but OpenAI has addressed most launch-day bugs. Users should monitor updates for any new issues.

  • Resolved GPT-4o issues: Many GPT-4o shortcomings are fixed in GPT-4.1. For example, code-diff output is now reliable, long-prompt comprehension is improved, and the model stays on task more consistently. Where GPT-4o sometimes lost focus, GPT-4.1 remains attentive and precise.



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