OpenAI quietly drops GPT-4o mini — the fast, cheap model

OpenAI has quietly launched GPT-4o mini, a smaller, faster, cheaper version of its flagship GPT-4o. It runs 60% faster than GPT-4o and costs 80% less per token. The model is already available through the OpenAI API and the ChatGPT web app, and it beats GPT-3.5 Turbo on benchmarks for reasoning, math, and coding.

For a startup like mine running a side business, this is the kind of change that reshapes margins overnight. At 20K context windows, it can read and summarize a 300-page PDF in seconds. For the kind of work we do — triaging support tickets, drafting emails, pulling data out of spreadsheets — the speed and price make it the practical choice over the flagship model for most day-to-day tasks.

Why this matters for us: smaller models that cost pennies are the quiet infrastructure behind the side hustles, the immigrant-owned shops using AI to handle customer service, the abuelas who can finally ask their phone to translate a doctor's note. This is the kind of tool that makes AI actually affordable for la gente, not just for big companies with big budgets.