OpenAI recently announced a major decision: starting next month, several early large models will officially be retired from the history of ChatGPT. Among them is GPT-4o, which was particularly popular among paying users.

The Final Curtain for GPT-4o

Launch and Return: OpenAI launched GPT-4o in May 2024, quickly gaining a large number of loyal users with its unique conversational style. Although it was temporarily taken offline after the release of GPT-5, causing user dissatisfaction, it regained access following a promise from CEO Sam Altman.

Reasons for Retirement: Data monitoring shows that only 0.1% of daily active users are still using GPT-4o, while the majority have shifted to more advanced GPT-5.2.

Official Stance: OpenAI stated that with the comprehensive improvements in personalization, customization, and creative thinking in new models, the time has come to retire the old models.

List of Models Being Discontinued

In addition to GPT-4o, the models being added to the discontinuation list include:

GPT-4 series: GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1mini.

o4 series: OpenAI o4-mini.

Early versions of GPT-5 series: GPT-5Instant and GPT-5Thinking.

Inevitable Technological Advancement

Although GPT-4o once amazed the world with its human-like interaction, AI technology evolves rapidly. With the new generation models like GPT-5.2 showing overwhelming advantages in programming efficiency (such as writing 3 million lines of code in a single week) and mathematical logic breakthroughs (such as passing the Gödel test), the retirement of older models has become an inevitable part of industry development.