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OpenAI launched a new family of AI models this morning that significantly improve coding abilities while cutting costs, responding directly to growing competition in the enterprise AI market.

The San Francisco-based AI company introduced three models — GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano — all available immediately through its API. The new lineup performs better at software engineering tasks, follows instructions more precisely, and can process up to one million tokens of context, equivalent to about 750,000 words.

“GPT-4.1 offers exceptional performance at a lower cost,” said Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, during Monday’s announcement. “These models are better than GPT-4o on just about every dimension.”

Perhaps most significant for enterprise customers is the pricing: GPT-4.1 will cost 26% less than its predecessor, while the lightweight nano version becomes OpenAI’s most affordable offering at just 12 cents per million tokens.

How GPT-4.1’s improvements target enterprise developers’ biggest pain points

In a candid interview with VentureBeat, Michelle Pokrass, post training research lead at OpenAI, emphasized that practical business applications drove the development process.

“GPT-4.1 was trained with one goal: being useful for developers,” Pokrass told VentureBeat. “We’ve found GPT-4.1 is much better at following the kinds of instructions that enterprises use in pr...