GPT-4.1 nano
Minimal footprint 4.1 for background automation tasks.
About GPT-4.1 nano
At $0.10 per million input tokens and nearly 172 tokens per second, GPT-4.1 nano sits at one of the most compelling price-to-speed ratios available from any major provider. It's built for production pipelines where throughput and cost directly affect margins — classification, extraction, autocompletion, and high-volume automation — not for the tasks that need careful multi-step reasoning. The million-token context window is a genuine standout for a model at this price point, letting you feed entire codebases or long document collections without truncation. Users consistently praise how well it follows instructions and how quickly responses arrive; that snappy 0.61-second time-to-first-token matters when you're powering a live product. The honest tradeoff: an intelligence index ranking of 59th out of 85 models reflects the real ceiling. Complex analysis and tasks requiring deep accuracy verification are better handed off to a heavier model. For everything else where you've confirmed a smaller model hits your accuracy bar, nano is the clear cost-conscious choice over its own predecessor, GPT-4o mini.
Best for
- Real-time classification and tagging of text, emails, or customer feedback at scale
- Autocompletion and code completion features where low latency is essential
- Batch extraction of structured data from long documents using the 1M-token context window
- Customer support chatbots and automated triage systems that must operate cost-efficiently at high volume
- Content moderation pipelines processing large quantities of text with tight latency budgets
Specs & capabilities
How GPT-4.1 nano stacks up — intelligence, speed, context, and modalities.
Intelligence
Low
Speed
Fast
Context window
1,047,576 tokens
Max output
32,768 tokens
Knowledge cutoff
June 1, 2024
Frequently asked questions
How much does GPT-4.1 nano cost?
$0.10 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens. Cached inputs receive a 75% discount, bringing them down to $0.025 per million tokens — a significant saving for repetitive or templated workloads.
What is the context window?
1,047,576 tokens (just over one million), which is unusually large for a model at this price tier. It allows processing very long documents or extensive conversation histories in a single call.
What is GPT-4.1 nano good at?
Speed-sensitive tasks: classification, autocompletion, information extraction, and high-volume automation where cost and latency matter more than deep reasoning. It is also strong at instruction-following and producing concise responses.
What should I not use it for?
Complex reasoning, nuanced analysis, or tasks where accuracy errors are costly. Its intelligence index ranks 59th out of 85 models, and users have noted reliability concerns on tasks that require verification or multi-step logic.
How does it compare to GPT-4o mini?
GPT-4.1 nano is approximately 1.5x cheaper than GPT-4o mini on both input and output, roughly twice as fast, and supports a far larger context window. It also outperforms GPT-4o mini on GPQA and coding benchmarks, making it the stronger choice for cost-sensitive production use.
Does it support images?
It can accept text and image input, but only outputs text. It cannot generate images or other non-text content.