OpenAI’s GPT-4o may have survived its first brush with going offline, but it won’t be as lucky this time. OpenAI has officially retired GPT-4o, the ChatGPT model that was seen as more conversational and notoriously sycophantic, on February 13. The news of GPT-4o’s end was first announced in a post on the OpenAI website in January, but the discontinuation also included GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini from ChatGPT.
It’s not the first time that OpenAI has delisted GPT-4o as an option for ChatGPT. In August, the AI giant sunsetted the GPT-4o model in favor of rolling out 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’ll be around forever.
This time around, OpenAI doesn’t seem very open to preserving access to GPT-4o, especially since it’ll serve only a small portion of the user base. The company wrote on its website that “the vast majority of usage has shifted to GPT‑5.2, with only 0.1 percent of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.” On top of that, OpenAI is facing several wrongful death lawsuits that specifically mention the GPT-4o model. Despite the two weeks of notice before GPT-4o’s last day online, there is still a vocal group of users mourning the loss of their AI boyfriends and even calling for OpenAI to open-source their preferred model.
