OpenAI is winding down its GPT-4 AI model in ChatGPT

OpenAI will soon retire GPT-4, an AI model it launched over two years ago, from ChatGPT, the company announced in a changelog on Thursday.

Effective April 30, GPT-4 will be “fully replaced” by GPT-4o, the current default model for ChatGPT, OpenAI said. However, GPT-4 will remain available in OpenAI’s API.

“In head‑to‑head evaluations, [GPT-4o] consistently surpasses GPT‑4 in writing, coding, STEM, and more,” wrote OpenAI in the changelog. “Recent upgrades have further improved GPT‑4o’s instruction following, problem solving, and conversational flow, making it a natural successor to GPT‑4.”

GPT-4 rolled out in March 2023 for ChatGPT, and also for Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot on the web. Several versions of GPT-4 had multimodal capabilities, allowing them to understand both images and text — a first for a widely deployed OpenAI model.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that GPT-4, which is reportedly massive in size, cost more than $100 million to train. It was succeeded by GPT-4 Turbo in November 2023, a faster and cheaper model.

GPT-4 is one of the models at the heart of copyright disputes between OpenAI and publishers including The New York Times. Publishers allege that OpenAI trained GPT-4 on their data without their knowledge or consent. OpenAI claims that fair use doctrine shields it from liability.

GPT-4’s coming retirement will likely follow the release of new models in ChatGPT. According to reverse engineer Tibor Blaho, OpenAI is readying a family of models called GPT-4.1 — GPT-4.1 mini, GPT-4.1 nano, and GPT-4.1 — as well as the o3 “reasoning” model the company announced in December and a new reasoning model called o4-mini.