GPT-4o
OpenAI·May 2024proprietary
GPT-4o ("omni") was the first OpenAI model to natively handle text, image and audio in one network, powering real-time voice experiences. It is two generations behind the frontier now and comparatively expensive for its capability, but its real-time audio pipeline and enormous installed base keep it relevant. Teams starting today usually pick GPT-5 mini or GPT-5.2 instead unless they specifically need 4o's voice stack.
Benchmark results
Where it shines
- Native real-time audio input and output
- Huge ecosystem familiarity and tooling support
- Stable, well-known failure modes
Alternatives to GPT-4o
Alibaba's trillion-parameter API flagship — frontier-adjacent quality with strong agentic tool use at mid-tier prices.
Google's November 2025 frontier breakout — 91.9% GPQA Diamond and 37.5% HLE made it the reasoning leader of its generation.
Google's 2025 workhorse flagship — first mainstream thinking model with a 1M context, still widely deployed.
The sparse-attention release that halved DeepSeek's already-lowest-in-class prices while keeping GPT-class quality.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does the GPT-4o API cost?
- GPT-4o costs $2.5 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input at $1.25 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $40.00.
- What is the context window of GPT-4o?
- GPT-4o supports a context window of 128,000 tokens (128K), with up to 16K output tokens per response.
- Is GPT-4o open source?
- No — GPT-4o is a proprietary model available through OpenAI's API and partner platforms.
- What are the best alternatives to GPT-4o?
- The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek V3.2. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.