GPT-4.1 mini

GPT-4.1 Mini sits in the middle of OpenAI's GPT-4.1 family, released on April 14, 2025 alongside the larger GPT-4.1 and the smaller GPT-4.1 Nano. The family was introduced through API-only access at launch, with the models positioned as a successor tier to GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini, carrying forward the refreshed knowledge cutoff of June 2024. GPT-4.1 Mini is engineered to inherit the family's gains in coding and instruction following while running at a smaller scale, and it became the default fallback model for free-tier ChatGPT users starting May 14, 2025, replacing GPT-4o Mini in that role.

All three GPT-4.1 models share a 1 million token context window, and OpenAI highlights that they "outperform GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini across the board, with major gains in coding and instruction following." Practical strengths surface in three areas: long-context comprehension, where the family is tuned to make productive use of the expanded window; instruction following, where GPT-4.1 lifted Scale MultiChallenge scores well above GPT-4o; and coding, where the family posted leading SWE-bench Verified results. GPT-4.1 Mini carries these strengths into a lighter, lower-cost profile, making it a sensible fit for production workloads that need strong reasoning and long-context handling without the full GPT-4.1 footprint.