GPT-4.1 nano vs o1

GPT-4.1 nano

OpenAI

GPT-4.1 nano is OpenAI's smallest member of the GPT-4.1 family, released in April 2025 alongside GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini as the latency-optimized, cost-minimized option for high-throughput applications. Positioned below GPT-4.1 mini in both size and cost, it was designed for use cases where speed and affordability dominate over raw capability — including tool calling, intent classification, short-form instruction following, and retrieval-augmented lookup tasks. Unlike its larger siblings, it supports fine-tuning, making it a practical candidate for task-specific customization at scale without incurring the cost of fine-tuning larger models.

o1

OpenAI

OpenAI o1, released by OpenAI in December 2024, is a reasoning-focused large language model that applies extended chain-of-thought processing before generating responses. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, demonstrating strong performance on STEM benchmarks requiring multi-step reasoning. o1 targets mathematics, science, and coding tasks where careful deliberation over the problem produces more accurate outputs than direct generation.