GPT-4o Mini
OpenAI's most cost-efficient small model — fast, multimodal, and ideal for high-volume tasks with vision and tool use.
Overview
What is GPT-4o Mini
GPT-4o Mini is OpenAI's most cost-efficient small model, released July 18, 2024. It supports text and vision inputs, function calling, and web search, with strong performance on benchmarks like MMLU (82%) while being significantly cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo. It has a 128K context window and knowledge cutoff October 2023.
Running it privately on Venice
On Venice, GPT-4o Mini runs with anonymized privacy — your prompts are never stored, profiled, or used for training. You get full access to its vision, tool use, and web search capabilities without surveillance, making it ideal for sensitive workflows or high-volume applications where cost and privacy both matter.
Assessment
Strengths and limitations
- Highly cost-efficient: more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo with better performance.
- Supports vision, tool use, and web search, enabling rich multimodal workflows.
- Fast and low-latency, ideal for real-time applications like customer support chatbots.
- Scores 82% on MMLU, outperforming GPT-3.5 Turbo in textual intelligence and reasoning.
- Improved multilingual understanding due to shared tokenizer with GPT-4o.
- Closed and proprietary: no open weights, so cannot be self-hosted or fine-tuned.
- Knowledge cutoff is October 2023, so lacks awareness of events after that date.
- Weaker than flagship models like GPT-4o on complex reasoning and vision tasks.
- No audio or video I/O support yet: only text and image inputs with text output.
Capabilities
What it supports
- Tool use / function calling
- Vision (image input)
- Reasoning
- Web search
- Code-optimized
- Structured output (JSON schema)
- Audio input
- Video input
- Multiple image inputs
- Log probabilities
Specifications
Datasheet
- Maker
- OpenAI
- Released
- July 18, 2024
- Architecture
- Multimodal transformer
- Parameters
- Not publicly disclosed
- Open/closed
- Closed source
- Context window
- 128K tokens
- Max output
- 16.384K tokens
- Capabilities
- Vision, Function calling, Web search
- Privacy on Venice
- Anonymized — prompts not stored
- Available on Venice since
- Feb 2026
- License
- Proprietary
API
Call it from your code
Venice exposes an OpenAI-compatible API. Point your base URL at Venice and pass the model id.
curl https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "openai-gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum tunneling simply." }]
}'Pricing
What it costs on Venice
Billed per token on Venice: $0.19 per 1M input tokens and $0.75 per 1M output tokens.
New Venice accounts include a free daily allowance and 500 welcome credits — no credit card required.
Alternatives
How it compares
| Model | Best for | Max context | Input price (Venice) | Output price (Venice) | Open weights |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4o Mini | Balanced cost and capability for high-volume multimodal tasks. | 128K tokens | $0.19 in · $0.75 out / 1M | $0.75 | No |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 | Cheaper output and much larger context window — strong alternative for long-context workloads. | 1M tokens | $0.17 in · $0.35 out / 1M | $0.35 | No |
| Google Gemma 4 31B Instruct | Open weights and lower cost — good for developers wanting transparency and customization. | 256K tokens | $0.12 in · $0.36 out / 1M | $0.36 | Yes |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | More expensive but stronger reasoning and much longer context — better for complex tasks. | 1M tokens | $3.60 in · $18 out / 1M | $18.00 | No |
Balanced cost and capability for high-volume multimodal tasks.
Use cases
What it is good for
- 01High-volume customer support automation with image input support.
- 02Multimodal data extraction from documents and screenshots.
- 03Lightweight agent workflows using function calling and web search.
- 04Cost-sensitive applications chaining multiple model calls.
- 05Multilingual text processing and translation tasks.
Prompting
Getting better results
Include images when context requires visual understanding — GPT-4o Mini processes them natively.
Use structured outputs (JSON schema) for reliable data extraction.
Chain with web search for up-to-date answers despite the 2023 knowledge cutoff.
Leverage cached input pricing on Venice for repeated context to reduce costs.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
GPT-4o Mini is OpenAI's most cost-efficient small model, released July 18, 2024. It supports text and image inputs, function calling, and web search, with a 128K context window and knowledge up to October 2023. It's designed for high-volume, low-latency applications.
On Venice, GPT-4o Mini costs $0.19 per 1M input tokens and $0.75 per 1M output tokens. Cached input is $0.09 per 1M tokens, making repeated context more affordable.
No. GPT-4o Mini is a closed, proprietary model developed by OpenAI. It is not free to use — pricing is based on token usage. There are no open weights available for self-hosting or fine-tuning.
Yes. GPT-4o Mini supports image inputs and can reason about visual content alongside text. It produces text outputs, including structured JSON, based on both modalities.
Yes. GPT-4o Mini supports function calling and tool use, enabling it to interact with external APIs, retrieve real-time data via web search, and return structured outputs.
GPT-4o Mini has a 128,000-token context window, allowing it to process long documents, codebases, or conversation histories in a single request.
GPT-4o Mini is better overall — it's more than 60% cheaper, scores higher on MMLU (82% vs 69.8%), supports vision, and has improved multilingual performance. It's faster and more capable than GPT-3.5 Turbo in nearly every way.
Yes, when enabled via web search. GPT-4o Mini can retrieve up-to-date information through web search tools, compensating for its October 2023 knowledge cutoff.
Run GPT-4o Mini privately
No prompt logging. No data used for training.