Farewell GPT-4: The End of an Era, The Rise of GPT-4o and Beyond
On April 30, 2025, OpenAI officially retired GPT-4 from its ChatGPT product. After serving as the backbone of premium AI interactions for over two years, GPT-4 has now stepped aside to make room for a faster, smarter, and more versatile successor: GPT-4o.
While the change might feel sudden to some, it represents a natural progression in the ever-accelerating AI landscape.
Why GPT-4 Was Retired
GPT-4 launched in March 2023, and quickly became the gold standard for AI-based language models. It powered ChatGPT Plus, set benchmarks in creative writing, problem-solving, and reasoning, and helped push generative AI into the mainstream.
But over time, cracks began to show. Users noticed slower response times, higher costs, and sometimes inconsistent outputs. Though still powerful, GPT-4 was no longer the most efficient option on the table.
Enter GPT-4o (the “o” stands for “omni”)—a native multimodal model capable of processing text, images, and audio with significantly better speed and memory efficiency. OpenAI reports that GPT-4o is faster, cheaper, and more interactive, with improved instruction-following and a more fluid conversation style.
What Changes for Users
- Free and Plus users of ChatGPT are now defaulted to GPT-4o, which outperforms GPT-4 in nearly all benchmarks.
- GPT-4 is no longer accessible within ChatGPT, even for paying users.
- However, GPT-4 remains available for developers via the OpenAI API and Azure OpenAI services (though some variants like
gpt-4-32kandgpt-4-vision-previeware also being phased out by mid-May 2025).
The Capabilities of GPT-4o
With GPT-4o, OpenAI has delivered a true multimodal experience:
- You can now interact with the model using voice, images, and text seamlessly.
- It supports real-time voice conversations, making it feel more like a talking assistant than a chatbot.
- It handles visual inputs such as photos, screenshots, or documents with impressive accuracy.
- GPT-4o boasts a larger context window, enabling deeper, more connected conversations.
In other words, it's not just faster—it’s smarter and more human-like in its understanding and delivery.
The Bigger Picture
The retirement of GPT-4 symbolizes more than a product update—it’s a milestone in AI evolution.
We’ve moved from models that merely understand text to ones that can see, hear, speak, and reason. The transition mirrors the shift from black-and-white TV to high-definition color streaming.
It also raises new possibilities:
- Real-time AI companions for education and productivity
- Advanced accessibility tools for those with disabilities
- Cross-modal creativity, where audio, text, and visuals converge
But with progress comes responsibility. As models like GPT-4o grow more powerful, the need for ethical boundaries, user transparency, and robust safety protocols becomes more urgent.
What’s Next?
According to OpenAI, GPT-4.1 was also launched in April 2025, promising an even larger token window (up to 1 million tokens) and better performance in programming, instruction-following, and memory.
And while GPT-4 is gone from the front stage, it leaves behind a legacy that shaped the AI boom of the 2020s. Its retirement isn’t a loss—it’s a passing of the torch to a new generation of AI.
In the end, GPT-4 didn’t die. It evolved.
Are you ready for what’s next?
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