What does "omni" mean in GPT-4o's name?

It reflects the model's end-to-end native training across text, audio, image, and video modalities, rather than being a combination of separate specialist models connected by a pipeline.

How much faster is GPT-4o's audio response compared to earlier voice pipelines?

GPT-4o averages 320 milliseconds for audio responses; the prior GPT-4 Turbo-based voice approach averaged 5.4 seconds, making GPT-4o approximately 16x faster for voice.

How does GPT-4o's API pricing compare to GPT-4 Turbo?

GPT-4o launched at lower API cost than GPT-4 Turbo while matching its performance on English text and code, and improving on non-English languages.

What input and output modalities does GPT-4o support?

Inputs: text, audio, image, video. Outputs: text, audio, and image. This breadth makes it flexible for diverse multimodal application architectures.

Is the "gpt-4o" model alias the same as a specific dated snapshot?

No. The alias `gpt-4o` points to the latest stable version, which may be updated over time. Dated snapshots like gpt-4o-2024-05-13 or gpt-4o-2024-11-20 pin to specific releases.

Does routing GPT-4o through AI Gateway add latency?

AI Gateway is designed as a lightweight routing layer. For most applications, the observability, caching, and authentication benefits outweigh any marginal overhead.

What are typical latency characteristics?

This page shows live throughput and time-to-first-token metrics measured across real AI Gateway traffic.

OpenAI

GPT-4o

GPT-4o is OpenAI's first natively multimodal "omni" model, unifying text, audio, image, and video processing within a single end-to-end trained architecture and delivering audio response times averaging 320 milliseconds, comparable to human conversational latency.

View API reference

Input and output price: Prices from: Input $2.50, Output $10, Per 1M tokens
24h uptime: Loading AI Gateway uptime

Get API key Read the docs

import { streamText } from 'ai'

const result = streamText({
  model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
  prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'
})

Read docs

Overview Playground Providers Uptime Status Throughput Latency API Similar About FAQ

Copy link to headingPlayground

Try out GPT-4o by OpenAI. Usage is billed to your team at API rates. Free users (those who haven't made a payment) get $5 of credits every 30 days.

GPT-4o

Copy link to headingProviders

Route requests across multiple providers. Copy a provider slug to set your preference. Visit the docs for more info. Using a provider means you agree to their terms, listed under Legal.

Provider

Context	Max Output	Latency	Throughput	Input	Output	Cache	Web Search	Capabilities	ZDR	No Training	Free Tier	Release Date

Azure

Legal:Terms•Privacy

128K

16K

0.7 s

116 tps

$2.50/M

$10/M

Read$1.25/M

$14/K

05/13/2024

OpenAI

Legal:Terms•Privacy

128K

16K

0.7 s

58 tps

$2.50/M+1 more

$10/M+1 more

Read$1.25/M

$10/K

05/13/2024

Getting started

Call GPT-4o through AI Gateway with the AI SDK generateText and streamText functions, or through the OpenAI Chat Completions, OpenAI Responses, and Anthropic Messages APIs by changing the base URL. AI Gateway authenticates the request and routes it to an available provider.

Install the AI SDK (pnpm add ai dotenv), create an API key from the API Keys page, and set it as AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY in your environment. Full setup is covered in the text generation quickstart.

index.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
    prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?',
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Top-level parameters

The same GPT-4o request in each API format AI Gateway supports.

top-level-params.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
    system: 'You are a concise technical assistant.',
    prompt: 'Summarize the tradeoffs between static generation and SSR.',
    maxOutputTokens: 1024,
    temperature: 0.5,
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Standard parameters like prompt, messages, temperature, and tools work as documented in the AI SDK docs. These are the parameters with model-specific behavior.

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`model`	`string`	Yes	Model ID in the form `creator/model`, e.g. `openai/gpt-4o`. AI Gateway routes the request to an available provider.
`maxOutputTokens`	`number`	No	Hard cap on generated tokens. GPT-4o supports up to `16,384` output tokens.
`providerOptions`	`Record<string, JSONValue>`	No	AI Gateway routing options under `gateway`, plus any provider-native options under the provider’s own namespace — see the table below.

Input limits

Input	Formats	Sources	Max count	Max size	Limits
Text	—	—	—	—	Prompt and response share the 128K-token context window
Image	—	URL, base64, Uint8Array	—	—	Sent as image parts in messages; counts as input tokens
PDF	—	URL, base64, Uint8Array	—	—	Sent as file parts in messages; counts as input tokens

Provider options

Set AI Gateway routing options under providerOptions.gateway. For provider-specific options, pass them under the provider’s namespace as documented by the AI SDK.

Learn more in the AI SDK openai provider docs.

provider-options.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
    prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?',
    providerOptions: {
      gateway: {
        only: ['azure', 'openai'],
      },
    },
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

These AI Gateway routing options apply to every model. Provider-specific options pass through under the provider’s own namespace (for example providerOptions.anthropic) exactly as documented by the AI SDK.

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`providerOptions.gateway.only`	`string[]`	No	Restrict routing to these provider slugs. Requests fail over only within the listed providers.
`providerOptions.gateway.order`	`string[]`	No	Preferred provider order. Listed providers are tried first; unlisted providers remain available as fallbacks.
`providerOptions.gateway.sort`	`'cost' \| 'ttft' \| 'tps'`	No	Rank candidate providers by price, time to first token, or tokens per second instead of the default routing order.
`providerOptions.gateway.zeroDataRetention`	`boolean`	No	Route only to providers with a zero-data-retention policy for this model.

Routing across providers

AI Gateway serves the same model through multiple providers and fails over automatically. order expresses a preference while keeping every provider eligible; only is a hard allowlist — if none of the listed providers are available the request fails instead of falling back.

Options under a provider's own namespace (for example providerOptions.anthropic) are forwarded to that provider with the request. Providers ignore option namespaces that don't apply to them, so it is safe to set provider options alongside gateway routing options.

Image input

Send images alongside text as message parts. Images count as input tokens.

image-input.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
    messages: [
      {
        role: 'user',
        content: [
          { type: 'text', text: 'Describe this image.' },
          { type: 'image', image: 'https://example.com/photo.jpg' },
        ],
      },
    ],
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

PDF input

Attach PDFs as file parts. Their contents count as input tokens.

pdf-input.ts

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
    messages: [
      {
        role: 'user',
        content: [
          { type: 'text', text: 'Summarize this document.' },
          {
            type: 'file',
            mediaType: 'application/pdf',
            data: 'https://example.com/document.pdf',
          },
        ],
      },
    ],
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Tool calling

Expose tools the model can call. Define each tool’s inputs with a Zod schema.

tool-calling.ts

import { generateText, tool } from 'ai';
import { z } from 'zod';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
    prompt: 'What is the weather in San Francisco?',
    tools: {
      getWeather: tool({
        description: 'Get the current weather for a location',
        inputSchema: z.object({ location: z.string() }),
        execute: async ({ location }) => ({ location, temperatureC: 18 }),
      }),
    },
  });

  console.log(result.text);
}

main().catch(console.error);

Copy link to headingMore models by OpenAI

Model

Context	Latency	Throughput	Input	Output	Cache	Web Search	Capabilities	Providers	ZDR	No Training	Free Tier	Release Date

openai/gpt-6-astra

1.1M

2.9 s

56 tps

$10/M+2 more

$50/M+2 more

Read$1/M

Write$12.50/M

$10/K

09/04/2026

openai/gpt-5.6-luna

1.1M

2.4 s

156 tps

$0.20/M+2 more

$1.20/M+2 more

Read$0.02/M

Write$0.25/M

$10/K

07/09/2026

openai/gpt-5.6-sol

1.1M

2.6 s

69 tps

$2/M+2 more

$10/M+2 more

Read$0.20/M

Write$2.50/M

$10/K

07/09/2026

openai/gpt-5.6-terra

1.1M

2.6 s

94 tps

$2/M+2 more

$12/M+2 more

Read$0.20/M

Write$2.50/M

$10/K

07/09/2026

openai/gpt-5.4

1.1M

3.5 s

88 tps

$2.50/M+2 more

$15/M+2 more

Read$0.25/M

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03/05/2026

openai/gpt-5-nano

400K

4.4 s

208 tps

$0.05/M

$0.40/M

Read$0.005/M

$14/K

08/07/2025

Copy link to headingAbout GPT-4o

GPT-4o was announced on May 13, 2024 at OpenAI's Spring Updates event. The "o" stands for "omni," reflecting the model's foundational design: rather than connecting separate specialist models for different modalities, GPT-4o was trained end-to-end across text, audio, image, and video. This architectural choice enables sub-400-millisecond audio responses. Prior approaches chained a speech recognition model, a language model, and a text-to-speech model together, introducing latency at each boundary. GPT-4 Turbo-based voice averaged 5.4 seconds per turn.

GPT-4o matched GPT-4 Turbo on text and code in English while costing less in the API, with notable improvements on non-English text. This made it the default for developers who previously used GPT-4 Turbo: an upgrade in multimodal capability at a lower price.

The model accepts any combination of text, audio, image, and video as input and can generate text, audio, and image outputs. This flexibility spans real-time voice assistants, vision pipelines that analyze photographs or documents, and agents that process video frames alongside textual context.

Copy link to headingWhat To Consider When Choosing a Provider

Configuration: For applications that mix modalities (for example, a voice interface that also accepts image uploads), a single model endpoint simplifies both architecture and cost accounting compared to separate specialist models.
Zero Data Retention: Zero Data Retention is available for this model. It is offered on a per-provider and model basis. See the documentation for details.
Authentication: AI Gateway authenticates requests using an API key or OIDC token. You do not need to manage provider credentials directly.

Copy link to headingWhen to Use GPT-4o

Best for

Real-time voice applications: Native audio processing eliminates pipeline latency between speech recognition, reasoning, and synthesis
Mixed-modality workflows: Processing both images and text together for visual question answering or document analysis with figures
Cost-efficient GPT-4 quality: Applications that need GPT-4-class text quality with lower API cost than GPT-4 Turbo
Multilingual applications: Products that benefit from GPT-4o's improved non-English text performance
Evolving multimodal products: Apps that may expand from text-only to multimodal inputs over time with a single model supporting that evolution

Consider alternatives when

Maximum coding capability: GPT-4.1 benchmarks are meaningfully better for some coding use cases
Cost-driven workloads: GPT-4.1 mini provides sufficient quality at lower cost
Deep multi-step reasoning: The o-series reasoning models' chain-of-thought approach is superior for complex analytical problems

Copy link to headingConclusion

GPT-4o introduced native omni-modal processing as a practical API capability, eliminating the latency penalties of chained pipeline architectures and matching GPT-4 Turbo quality at lower cost. For applications that need a single model to handle text, audio, and vision inputs reliably, it remains a strong foundation through AI Gateway.

Copy link to headingFrequently Asked Questions

What does "omni" mean in GPT-4o's name?
It reflects the model's end-to-end native training across text, audio, image, and video modalities, rather than being a combination of separate specialist models connected by a pipeline.
How much faster is GPT-4o's audio response compared to earlier voice pipelines?
GPT-4o averages 320 milliseconds for audio responses; the prior GPT-4 Turbo-based voice approach averaged 5.4 seconds, making GPT-4o approximately 16x faster for voice.
How does GPT-4o's API pricing compare to GPT-4 Turbo?
GPT-4o launched at lower API cost than GPT-4 Turbo while matching its performance on English text and code, and improving on non-English languages.
What input and output modalities does GPT-4o support?
Inputs: text, audio, image, video. Outputs: text, audio, and image. This breadth makes it flexible for diverse multimodal application architectures.
Is the "gpt-4o" model alias the same as a specific dated snapshot?
No. The alias gpt-4o points to the latest stable version, which may be updated over time. Dated snapshots like gpt-4o-2024-05-13 or gpt-4o-2024-11-20 pin to specific releases.
Does routing GPT-4o through AI Gateway add latency?
AI Gateway is designed as a lightweight routing layer. For most applications, the observability, caching, and authentication benefits outweigh any marginal overhead.
What are typical latency characteristics?
This page shows live throughput and time-to-first-token metrics measured across real AI Gateway traffic.

Your use is subject to OpenAI's Terms & Privacy Policies.

Agent Stack

Core Platform

Tools

Learn

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GPT-4o

Copy link to headingPlayground

Copy link to headingProviders

Copy link to headingUptime24 hours

Copy link to headingThroughput24 hours

Copy link to headingLatency24 hours

Getting started

Top-level parameters

Input limits

Provider options

Routing across providers

Image input

PDF input

Tool calling

Copy link to headingMore models by OpenAI

Copy link to headingAbout GPT-4o

Copy link to headingWhat To Consider When Choosing a Provider

Copy link to headingWhen to Use GPT-4o

Best for

Consider alternatives when

Copy link to headingConclusion

Copy link to headingFrequently Asked Questions