OpenAI has officially retired the controversial GPT-4o model
OpenAI’s GPT-4o may have survived its first take offline, but it won’t be so lucky this time. OpenAI officially retired GPT-4o, the ChatGPT model that was considered more conversational and notoriously sycophantic, on February 13. News of the end of GPT-4o was first announced in a post on the OpenAI website in January, but the shutdown also included GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and ChatGPT’s OpenAI o4-mini.
This is not the first time that OpenAI has removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT options. In August, the AI giant abandoned the GPT-4o model in favor of deploying and prioritizing the latest GPT-5 model at the time. However, a wave of user complaints led OpenAI to restore access to GPT-4o, but with no guarantee that it will be there forever.
This time around, OpenAI doesn’t seem very willing to preserve access to GPT-4o, especially since it will only serve a small portion of the user base. The company wrote on its website that “the vast majority of usage has moved to GPT-5.2, with only 0.1% of users still choosing GPT-4o each day.” On top of that, OpenAI faces several wrongful death lawsuits that specifically mention the GPT-4o model. Despite the two weeks’ notice before GPT-4o’s last day of going live, there is still a group of users who are mourning the loss of their little AI friends and even asking OpenAI to open source their favorite model.
