Breakthroughs, Concerns in OpenAI's Latest Lineup

Safety Concerns Emerge Amid o3, o4-mini and GPT-4.1 Launches Rashmi Ramesh (rashmiramesh_) • April 18, 2025

OpenAI's mid-April announcements include its most advanced reasoning models o3 and o4-mini, with a biorisk monitor, the quietly released GPT-4.1 coding family, and the upcoming retirement of its costliest model, GPT-4.5.

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The rollout includes leaps in performance, such as 1 million token context windows, tool-enabled chain of thought reasoning and mitigation of lingering safety concerns. As the company refines pricing and model tiers, it also faces pressure to be transparent about testing rigor and risk mitigation strategies.

OpenAI launched on Wednesday o3 and o4-mini, two reasoning models that can natively use ChatGPT's web browsing, Python execution, image analysis and generation and file reading capabilities in their chain of thought processes.

The company positions o3 as its "most advanced reasoning model ...