Overview

OpenAI's flagship model, GPT-4 is a large-scale multimodal language model capable of solving difficult problems with greater accuracy than previous models due to its broader general knowledge and advanced reasoning...

History

GPT-4 became available via the OpenAI API on 2023-05-28.

Training & availability

Training data has a knowledge cutoff of 2021-09-30 — information about events after that date is unlikely to appear in the model's responses. OpenAI has not released the underlying model weights — access is via their hosted API only.

Capabilities

Context window: 8K tokens.
Max output: 4K tokens.
Input modalities: text.

Recommended for: agentic.

Limitations

The knowledge cutoff is 55 months old — this model will not know about recent events, releases, or API changes.
The context window (8K tokens) is modest by 2026 standards — unsuitable for processing long documents in a single request.
Text-only — cannot process images, audio, or video inputs.
At $60.00/1M output tokens, this is in the premium tier — verify cost-per-value for high-volume workloads.

Pricing

Input: $30.0000 per 1M tokens
Output: $60.0000 per 1M tokens

Use the cost calculator above to estimate monthly spend for your workload.

Quick start

Minimal example using the openai API. Copy, paste, replace the key.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(api_key="sk-...")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum computing in one sentence."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Cost calculator

Estimate your monthly bill. Presets are typical workload sizes.

Input tokens / month5.0M

@ $30/1M

Output tokens / month2.0M

@ $60/1M

Input cost

$150

5.0M × $30/1M

Output cost

$120

2.0M × $60/1M

Total / month

$270

$3240 / year

Providers & performance

2 providers

Multi-provider inference routes for this model — sorted by throughput. Latency is time-to-first-token; throughput is output tokens per second. Data from OpenRouter, measured over the last 30 minutes.

Provider	Throughput	Latency (TTFT)	Input $ / 1M	Output $ / 1M	Context	Quant	Supports
Azure	76tok/s	662ms	$30	$60	8K	—	tools · json
OpenAI	27tok/s	564ms	$30	$60	8K	—	tools · json

Benchmarks

Benchmark	Score	Source
Aider PolyglotCoding	44.9% pass@2	Third-party Papers With Code
Arena Hard AutoHuman preference	82.63% win rate	Third-party Papers With Code

Integrations & tooling support

Tool calling: Supported
Structured outputs: Not supported

Price vs quality

Overpriced

Mid-tier performance at frontier pricing.

Quality percentile: 66.7%
Effective price: $52.5/1M
Pricing breakdown: $30/1M in
$60/1M out

GPT-4