OpenAI’s New GPT 4.1 Models Excel at Coding

OpenAI announced today that it is releasing a new family of artificial intelligence models optimized to excel at coding, as it ramps up efforts to fend off increasingly stiff competition from companies like Google and Anthropic. Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said on a livestream that the new models are better than OpenAI’s most widely used model, GPT-4o, and better than its largest and most powerful model, GPT-4.5, in some ways. “Developers care a lot about coding and we've been improving our model's ability to write functional code,” Michelle Pokrass, who works on post-training at OpenAI, said during the Monday livestream. “We've been working on making it follow different formats and better explore repos, run unit tests and write code that compiles.” Over the past couple of years, OpenAI has parlayed feverish interest in ChatGPT, a remarkable chatbot first unveiled in late 2022, into a growing business selling access to more advanced chatbots and AI models. In a TED interview last week, Altman said that OpenAI had 500 million weekly active users, and that usage was “growing very rapidly.” OpenAI now offers a smorgasbord of different flavors of models with different capabilities and different pricing.