OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 mini and nano, its most capable small models yet | Technology News
OpenAI on Wednesday released GPT-5.4 mini and nano, bringing many of the capabilities of its flagship GPT-5.4 model to faster, cheaper models built for high-volume workloads.GPT-5.4 mini is a significant step up from GPT-5 mini across coding, reasoning, multimodal understanding, and tool use – while running more than twice as fast. In benchmarks, it approaches GPT-5.4-level pass rates at a fraction of the cost, making it one of the stronger performance-per-latency options for coding workflows. GPT-5.4 nano, the smaller and cheaper of the two, is designed for tasks where speed and cost take priority – classification, data extraction, ranking, and simpler coding subtasks.
The release follows OpenAI’s launch of GPT-5.4 earlier this month, which introduced mid-response course correction, improved deep web research, and stronger long-context reasoning.
The new models are built for workloads where latency shapes the product experience: coding assants that need to feel responsive, subagents completing supporting tasks in parallel, computer-use systems interpreting screenshots, and multimodal applications reasoning over images in real time.
A key use case is multi-model system design. In Codex, GPT-5.4 can handle planning and coordination while delegating narrower subtasks – searching a codebase, reviewing files, processing documents – to GPT-5.4 mini subagents running in parallel. In Codex, the mini model consumes only 30% of the GPT-5.4 quota, bringing the cost down to roughly one-third.
GPT-5.4 mini is available in the API, Codex, and ChatGPT. It supports text and image inputs, tool use, function calling, web search, file search, computer use, and a 400k context window. In ChatGPT, it is available to Free and Go users via the “Thinking” option in the + menu, and as a rate-limit fallback for GPT-5.4 Thinking for other users. GPT-5.4 nano is available via the API only.
API pricing is $0.75 per million input tokens and $4.50 per million output tokens for the mini, and $0.20 and $1.25 respectively for the nano.
