Eseandre Mordi
⬤ OpenAI is cleaning house with a major model retirement scheduled for February 13, 2026. The company confirmed it's removing GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 Mini, and o4-mini from ChatGPT, adding to the previously announced retirement of GPT-5 Instant and GPT-5 Thinking. The move signals a strategic shift in how OpenAI manages its consumer-facing product lineup.
⬤ The retirement only impacts ChatGPT's interface—API access stays untouched for now. OpenAI made clear that developers using these models through API integrations won't see any changes in February, showing the company is taking a phased approach that separates consumer updates from developer infrastructure.
⬤ Among the retiring models, GPT-4o stands out as a workhorse that powered much of ChatGPT's multimodal capabilities and general reasoning tasks. GPT-4.1 and its Mini variant handled everything from complex queries to lightweight, budget-friendly applications, while o4-mini served cost-conscious use cases. Pulling these models suggests OpenAI is consolidating around newer, more powerful systems.
⬤ The rapid retirement cycle reveals how fast the AI landscape is moving. Model lifecycles that once stretched years are now measured in months, forcing companies to rethink long-term planning around platform stability and enterprise deployment. As OpenAI accelerates its innovation pace, these retirements set new expectations for how quickly AI capabilities evolve and how businesses need to adapt.
Eseandre Mordi
