Question 1

What is GPT-4o mini?

Accepted Answer

GPT-4o mini is a large language model from OpenAI, released on 18 July 2024. Cheap, fast, and still surprisingly capable — OpenAI’s budget tier.

Question 2

When was GPT-4o mini released?

Accepted Answer

GPT-4o mini was released by OpenAI on 18 July 2024.

Question 3

How much does GPT-4o mini cost?

Accepted Answer

GPT-4o mini costs $0.15 per 1 million input tokens and $0.60 per 1 million output tokens via OpenAI’s API. At a typical 3:1 input/output ratio the blended cost works out to about $0.26 per 1M tokens.

Question 4

How smart is GPT-4o mini?

Accepted Answer

GPT-4o mini scores 56 out of 100 on our intelligence index — a capable mid-tier composite of MMLU, MMLU Pro, GPQA, MATH and HumanEval benchmark scores. That places it #20 of 22 language models we track.

Question 5

What is the context window of GPT-4o mini?

Accepted Answer

GPT-4o mini has a 128k-token context window — roughly 96,000 words of text. That’s what you can fit into a single request (your prompt plus all uploaded documents and the model’s response combined).

Question 6

What is GPT-4o mini best for?

Accepted Answer

GPT-4o mini is most useful for high-volume tasks and cost-sensitive apis. Its key strengths are cheapest openai model, fast and vision included.

Question 7

How fast is GPT-4o mini?

Accepted Answer

GPT-4o mini generates around 145 output tokens per second with a typical time-to-first-token of 320 ms on the major API providers. Reasoning models that "think" before answering will appear slower on tokens-per-second since they spend time on internal chain-of-thought.

Question 8

Is GPT-4o mini better than GPT-5.5 mini?

Accepted Answer

GPT-5.5 mini scores higher on our intelligence index (68 vs 56), so on the hardest tasks GPT-5.5 mini typically wins. GPT-4o mini can still be the better pick on price, latency or specific capabilities. See our full GPT-4o mini vs GPT-5.5 mini comparison at /ai-models/compare/gpt-5-5-mini-vs-gpt-4o-mini/.

Question 9

What is the best alternative to GPT-4o mini?

Accepted Answer

The closest alternatives to GPT-4o mini are GPT-5.5 mini, GPT-5.5 and GPT-4o. Each shares most of GPT-4o mini’s use-cases — pick by price, context window or specific capability rather than headline intelligence.

Question 10

Is GPT-4o mini open source?

Accepted Answer

No. GPT-4o mini is proprietary — the weights are not released. Access is via OpenAI’s own API and partner platforms. For open-weights alternatives in the same tier, see our open-source AI models page.

Question 11

Can I use GPT-4o mini for free?

Accepted Answer

The consumer ChatGPT product offers free, rate-limited access to a version of GPT-4o mini and DALL·E 3. The OpenAI API itself is paid — though new accounts get a small starting credit. Microsoft Copilot also bundles GPT access at no extra cost on some tiers.

GPT-4o mini

At a glance

Benchmark scores

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