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GPT-4

Definition

GPT-4 is OpenAI's fourth-generation general-purpose large language model, originally released 2023-03-14 as the first widely-available frontier multi-modal LLM. Successor to GPT-3 / GPT-3.5; predecessor to GPT-4o and the o-series reasoning models.

Wiki anchor

The wiki's canonical anchor for GPT-4 is its role as the teacher-model / formulation-phase LLM in production LLM pipelines, documented in the 2025-02-04 Yelp post (sources/2025-02-04-yelp-search-query-understanding-with-llms). Yelp uses GPT-4 for two purposes: (1) prompt formulation — the strongest available LLM for iterating prompts and defining output schemas before distilling down to a smaller model; (2) golden-dataset generation — GPT-4 labels a representative sample of production queries, which is then curated by humans and used to fine-tune the smaller GPT-4o- mini serving student.

Explicit disclosure verbatim: "This typically entails quick prototyping with the most powerful LLM available to us, such as the latest stable GPT-4 model, and creating many iterations of the prompt."

Tradeoffs

  • Highest per-token cost and latency among the OpenAI API family as of 2025 (superseded on perf/cost axes by GPT-4o- mini and o-series).
  • The formulation-phase use-case explicitly prefers quality over cost; production cost is controlled by distilling into a smaller model at scale-up time.

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