Curiosity · AI Model

GPT-4o

GPT-4o ("omni") is OpenAI's May 2024 multimodal model — the first GPT where text, image, and audio share one neural network instead of being bolted together. It made real-time voice affordable, cut GPT-4-class pricing roughly in half, and became the default ChatGPT model for most of 2024.

Model specs

Vendor
OpenAI
Family
GPT-4
Released
2024-05
Context window
128,000 tokens
Modalities
text, vision, audio, code
Input price
$2.5/M tok
Output price
$10/M tok
Pricing as of
2026-04-20

Strengths

  • First true omnimodal model — audio emotion, laughter, and tone preserved
  • Roughly 2x faster and 50% cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo at launch
  • Strong multilingual performance, especially non-Latin scripts
  • Wide ecosystem support — Azure, API, ChatGPT all shipped day-one

Limitations

  • Overtaken on reasoning by o1/o3 and on coding by GPT-4.1 and GPT-5
  • Native audio output gated behind Realtime API, not standard Chat Completions
  • Knowledge cutoff is October 2023 — stale for current-events tasks

Use cases

  • ChatGPT default consumer experience (2024-2025)
  • Voice interfaces and real-time agents via Realtime API
  • Image understanding — charts, screenshots, handwriting
  • Cost-sensitive general-purpose chat at GPT-4 quality

Benchmarks

BenchmarkScoreAs of
MMLU≈88.7%2024-05
HumanEval≈90.2%2024-05
MGSM (multilingual math)≈90.5%2024-05

Frequently asked questions

What is GPT-4o?

GPT-4o ("omni") is OpenAI's multimodal model released in May 2024. It is the first GPT model trained end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning one network handles all three modalities with ~320ms voice latency.

What is the context window of GPT-4o?

GPT-4o has a 128,000-token context window with up to 16,384 tokens of output per response.

How much does GPT-4o cost?

As of April 2026, GPT-4o is priced at roughly USD 2.50 per million input tokens and USD 10 per million output tokens on the OpenAI API, with cached input tokens discounted further.

Is GPT-4o still the best OpenAI model?

No. GPT-4o was flagship in 2024 but has been surpassed by GPT-4.1 for general tasks, by the o-series (o1, o3) for reasoning, and by GPT-5 tiers for 2026 work. It remains a solid cost-effective choice for everyday multimodal chat.

Sources

  1. OpenAI — Hello GPT-4o — accessed 2026-04-20
  2. OpenAI — Pricing — accessed 2026-04-20