GPT-4 is available and can be used by all registered ChatGPT-Plus users. GPT-4 was publicly presented on a YouTube livestream from OpenAI on March 14, 2023. Even earlier, at the beginning of March, the rumor mill was brewing after large language models were presented as a disruptive force for companies at the Microsoft event “AI in Focus — Digital Kickoff” — and Andreas Braun mentioned in a subordinate clause that the immediate release of GPT-4 was imminent:
“GPT-4 is OpenAI’s most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses.”
- OpenAI, Release Notes zu GPT-4
Following the announcement, there was much discussion on LinkedIn and Twitter in particular about the innovations that GPT-4 would bring. Speculation about the multimodality of GPT-4 and the creation of video and audio formats was confirmed with the release.
Accuracy, multimodality, and integration into business processes are important functionalities in the models. The GPT-4 family (including GPT-4o with multimodal processing and high accuracy in text and code) marks OpenAI's breakthrough to professional AI performance, but has been replaced by GPT-5 (August 2025) as a unified, adaptable system with integrated reasoning. GPT-5.1 (November 2025) further optimizes this with a more conversational tone and faster thinking, meaning that GPT-4 is no longer the latest and most advanced model, as OpenAI had previously announced. According to OpenAI, GPT-5 delivers more accurate results and detects logical errors more reliably. This opens up new interface and application possibilities for companies. However, to better understand the model's progress, it is worth taking a look back: What can GPT-4 and GPT-4o do, and how do they differ from the capabilities offered by GPT-5 today?
We have compiled everything you need to know about OpenAI's GPT-5 release in our article “GPT-5: Everything you need to know about the latest model at a glance.”
What Can GPT-4 Do?
According to OpenAI, GPT-4 generally has the following capabilities:
"GPT‑4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks."
OpenAI also addresses the following three core areas in more detail: “Creativity”, “Visual Inputs” & “Longer Context”
Creativity
- “GPT-4 is more creative and collaborative than ever before. It can work with users to create, edit, and review creative and technical writing tasks, such as composing songs, writing screenplays, or learning a user's writing style. ”
Visual Inputs
- “GPT-4 can accept images as input and generate labels, classifications, and analyses.
Example: If you upload an image that shows flour, eggs, butter, and milk, GPT-4 is able to make suggestions about what you can do with these foods:
- Pancakes or waffles
- Crepes
- French toast
- omelet or frittata
- Quiche
- Custard or pudding
- Cakes or cupcakes
- Muffins or bread cookies or biscuits”
At present, GPT-4/ChatGPT does not yet allow you to upload images or documents yourself in order to have them evaluated. However, this may change in a timely manner.
Longer Context
- GPT-4 is capable of processing large context windows, enabling use cases such as long-form content creation and conversations, as well as document search and analysis. The context windows vary depending on the GPT-4 model in terms of maximum context window: The base model supports 8,192 tokens, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o up to 128,000 tokens. Newer variants such as GPT-4.1 (April 2025) extend this to 1 million tokens, optimized for long documents and code bases.
More Abilities
- GPT-4 can identify humor:
During the initial presentation of GPT-4, an example of AI's understanding of humor was shown. It should be borne in mind that humor is very abstract and even among people it is often discussed what counts as humor and what does not. The fact that AI can identify humor — or take steps in that direction — is a major milestone. During the presentation by OpenAI, the sense of humor was presented using an example: GPT-4 was able to describe why a comic shown was considered funny.
- GPT-4 can check contracts and detect errors:
In this way, GPT-4 was able to immediately find weaknesses in an Ethereum contract within a few seconds.
- Create parts of program code:
Extending existing code to include requirements works very well: For example, changing and creating database queries
- Documenting program code:
Documenting program code adequately and well is sometimes a time-consuming task that can ideally be taken over by GPT-4 — as internal tests carried out by us have shown.
- Email templates create:
Generating email templates is not an unusual or new use case for using ChatGPT. But GPT-4 is not only good at designing classic emails, but is also developed to such an extent that it can have a certain “sensitivity.” Ideal for formulating email texts on difficult topics that aren't easy for you — or at least provide inspiration for them.
- New potentialities The visual Communication:
ChatGPT recently (December 2024) introduced real-time video, screen sharing, and image uploads in the mobile app — ideal for visual communication, presentations, or sharing complex content. These features are available to Team, Plus, and Pro users (except in the EU, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein) and are subject to daily usage limits.
- Finding titles and titles (at moinAI)
We also use ChatGPT for internal purposes. For example, to find inspiration for suitable headlines and titles for new categories in our product moinAI. GPT-4 can even give good advice when it comes to choosing the right emoji.
When Was GPT-4 Officially Unveiled?
GPT-4 was presented for the first time on March 14, 2023 at 9 pm via a YouTube live format from OpenAI. The recording is here visible.
What Can GPT-4 not Do?
Similar to GPT-3 in conjunction with ChatGPT, there is the problem that artificial intelligence sometimes comes up with content and presents it as facts. At this point, too, it is important to always carry out a fact-check before trusting the information provided and disseminating it to others.
The wiki article “Wrong Answers From AI? This Is how AI Hallucinations Arise” offers more background information.
How can I use GPT-4 for free?
For anyone using ChatGPT for free, the default model changed to GPT-5 as the main model in August 2025. If you go over the free request limits with GPT-5 output, the power-saving GPT-5 mini version is used as the default fallback model. GPT-4 remains available to developers via API and model selection, but in addition to GPT-5, GPT-4o and the GPT-4.1 series are primarily used for ChatGPT. Older models are not offered as standard for free accounts; once usage limits are exceeded, the system automatically switches to a “mini” variant, the fallbacks GPT-5 mini or GPT-4.1 mini. Here is an overview of the changes:
What Does GPT stand for?
GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and refers to a family of large neural networks developed by OpenAI to handle natural language processing tasks such as word generation, translation, and text classification.
What Is GPT-3?
GPT-3 is a model in the GPT series and was released in 2020. Before GPT-4 and GPT-4o, it was the largest and most powerful language model on the market. GPT-3 has achieved impressive results in many NLP tasks such as translation, text completion, and question-answering tasks, making it an important milestone in the development of artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
GPT-4 vs. GPT-3
According to OpenAI, GPT-4 is a significant increase over the previous model:
“We spent 6 months making GPT-4 more secure and customized. According to our internal analysis, GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for illegal content and 40% more likely to provide factual answers than GPT-3.5. ”
The self-test also shows that GPT-4 seems much more complex and intelligent. CEO Patrick Zimmermann has tested the new model himself and is convinced: “GPT-4 understands more complex queries better. You can incorporate a lot of context into the prompt; the so-called instructions can be significantly more complex than before.” Why is that: GPT-3, which was considered the largest language model at the time, was trained with 175 billion parameters. By way of comparison, GPT-4 is trained with 100 trillion parameters.
So which is better?
There is no universal recommendation as to which model is more suitable, as both GTP-3 and GTP-4 have their respective advantages and disadvantages. For simpler tasks, GTP-3 is often the better choice, while GTP-4 is preferred when higher accuracy is important for more complex tasks.
What Is GPT-4o?
GPT-4o (the “o” stands for “omni”) was released as a model variant on May 13, 2024. It is still in use in both the free and paid versions. GPT-4o is a multimodal language model and can process not only text, but also code, images, audio, and videos. Since the update (in November 2024), GPT-4o has an updated knowledge base up to June 2024, enabling it to provide more accurate and up-to-date information. In addition, the token capacity has been increased from 4,096 to 16,384 tokens, enabling it to efficiently process longer texts and extensive content.
Users can now also speak directly to GPT-4o, as spoken language processing is now possible. However, this feature is currently only available for the paid versions of GPT. In terms of performance, speed, and the quality of responses, the model far surpasses its predecessors. Among other things, grammar and phrasing in languages other than English are said to have improved significantly.
What Should Be Considered When Using GPT-4o?
As mentioned above, it is important to verify information presented as facts – this remains the case with GPT-4o as the new standard model. Furthermore, the AI's output, i.e., the answer provided by ChatGPT, is only as good as the input. This means that if the task/question received by GPT-4o via chat is not sufficiently and well-described, the result will suffer. Sentences or keywords used to obtain a response from ChatGPT are called prompts (singular: prompt). The more precise and well-worded the prompt, the more you can expect from the GPT-4o response.
GPT-4 vs. GPT-4o
With the release of GPT-4o, the initial question was whether the new model would replace GPT-4. It is now clear: GPT-4o is not just a supplement, but has completely replaced GPT-4 in the ChatGPT interface. As of April 30, 2025, GPT-4o has been the new standard model.
GPT-4o scores primarily with its higher speed and lower cost compared to GPT-4. It also offers features that GPT-4 did not natively support, such as image and audio processing. GPT-4o performs better in benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval and, according to OpenAI, is particularly impressive in multilingual and visual tasks.
GPT-4, on the other hand, has long offered the clear advantage of being able to render data in real time at any time because it has permanent access to the internet. But since a new update, GPT-4o now has permanent access to the Internet and even with the free version GPT-4.1 mini, users can now receive data in real time:
What Is GPT-4.5?
GPT-4.5 from OpenAI has been available since February 27, 2025. It has been optimized for even more natural and intuitive conversations – instead of strict step-by-step thinking, it focuses on fluid, understandable communication. The new model is particularly strong when it comes to everyday questions, texts, and summaries, while complex logic and programming are not its focus. Thanks to improved language guidance, higher accuracy, and fewer hallucinations, GPT-4.5 is designed to feel even more human.
GPT-4.5 is currently only used in ChatGPT to a limited extent. After the API removal on July 14, 2025, it will remain available in the model selection for ChatGPT Pro/Plus/Team users, but not for free users. The reasons were excessive costs and a computationally intensive model that was only intended for research but did not perform at the frontier level. API access ended definitively on July 14, 2025, with the migration to GPT-4.1, a more efficient and cost-effective variant.
GPT-4 vs. GPT-4.5
GPT-4 remains suitable for precise technical tasks such as code generation and creative writing (e.g., song lyrics, reports) wherever reliability is prioritized, and remains available in ChatGPT as a legacy option. GPT-4.5, on the other hand, prioritizes natural, emotionally intelligent interactions—ideal for customer support and marketing, as well as data summarization. In addition, tests such as SimpleQA show that GPT-4.5, with an accuracy rate of 62.5%, hallucinates significantly less and provides more accurate facts than GPT-4, which only achieved 38.2% in the same test. However, GPT-4.5 is less suited to complex logical analysis—specialized models remain the better choice here.
For more information on SimpleQA, see our encyclopedia article “SimpleQA – everything you need to know.”
However, GPT-4.5 as a model is now only available to Pro/Plus users, and GPT-5 has generally become the standard in ChatGPT, pushing GPT-4 into the background.
What is GPT-4.1?
GPT-4.1 is OpenAI's model series (Standard, Mini, Nano) and has been in use since April 2025. Unlike GPT-4o, which has been optimized for broad multimodality (text, image, audio, video), GPT-4.1 focuses on precision, reliability, and technical tasks—especially in the areas of programming and web development.
The model was originally only available via the API and enjoyed great popularity there, especially among developers. Due to high demand, it is now also available in ChatGPT via the model selection ("More Models")—for users with Plus, Pro, or Team plans. The model offers similar usage limits to GPT-4o, but, according to OpenAI, impresses with even more precise instruction following, improved coding capabilities, and more stable performance on complex tasks.
A more compact version has also been released: GPT-4.1 mini. Since May 2025, it has replaced the previous GPT-4o mini model as the standard fallback for free accounts once their GPT-4o limit is reached.
What is GPT-5?
GPT-5 is (as of August 2025) the latest and most powerful AI generation from OpenAI. According to the manufacturer and current benchmarks, the model is more intelligent in all areas and provides more accurate and useful answers in the fields of programming, mathematics, word processing, finance, and more. The model is characterized by its “reasoning” function, which enables it to analyze and solve complex tasks in greater depth. The following changes are particularly relevant (as of December 2025):
- Automatic Model Router: Dynamically selects between instant (fast) and deep thinking depending on the query
- Proactive AI Agent: Automatically completes tasks, including calendar management or code generation
GPT-5.1 (November 2025) further optimizes the conversational tone while simplifying the personalization of ChatGPT. OpenAI positions GPT-5 as an “AI expert for everyone,” i.e., an “expert tool for everyone.” It aims to improve collaboration between humans and AI by not only providing answers, but also asking relevant questions, thus making the work process more efficient.
GPT-4o vs. GPT-5
According to OpenAI, GPT-5 makes significant progress in several core areas compared to GPT-4o:
- Intelligence and accuracy: GPT-5 delivers more reliable results in all areas of application. It shows noticeable improvements, especially in complex tasks such as code debugging or financial analysis → According to OpenAI, GPT-5 makes at least 20% fewer factual errors than GPT-4o
- Thinking and reasoning: A key feature is the improved ability to approach problems in a structured way and solve tasks that previous models often handled incorrectly
- Less “yes-man” behavior: GPT-5 is less inclined to blindly agree with user input. It is able to recognize and correct logical errors in the user's prompt.
- Multimodality: Like GPT-4o, GPT-5 processes text and images. However, it interprets visual content with even greater precision and flexibility.
- Adaptability for businesses: GPT-5 can work better with internal company data by accessing files via integrated apps such as Google Drive or SharePoint (if enabled).
After its release, there was both very positive feedback about its intelligence and accuracy, as well as criticism regarding its writing style and interaction length compared to GPT-4o. OpenAI has since made adjustments.
Comparison of Current GPT Models (as of July 2025)
Which version is suitable for what? The following overview shows the current ChatGPT models, including their strengths, areas of application, and limitations.
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