When OpenAI launched ChatGPT-01 in late 2024, it was hailed as a game-changer. With multi-step reasoning and image analysis abilities, it was the first of its kind—and came with a hefty price tag of $200/month (around ₹16,500), earning the nickname “AI for the elite.”
But fast forward to just four months later, and it’s been quietly phased out in favour of the much more efficient and affordable o4-mini-high.
What Went Wrong ?
Sky-High Running Costs: O1’s inference costs were 4x higher than GPT-4.0, with slower responses and no advanced visual capabilities. Even OpenAI itself suggested users switch to GPT-4.0 in most situations.
Tough Competition from China: Enter DeepSeek-R1, an open-source Chinese model that costs a fraction to train and still achieves 87% of O1’s accuracy (which was at 92.8%). That’s serious competition, especially for markets like India where cost matters as much as performance.
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that O1 wasn’t AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and had lost its edge. And with the release of o3-mini earlier in 2025 at 63% less cost, O1’s exit was pretty much inevitable.
1.Meet o4-mini-high: OpenAI’s Affordable Powerhouse
On April 17, 2025, OpenAI dropped a bombshell: o4-mini-high, a compact, affordable, yet incredibly powerful model. And this time, the focus wasn’t just on high-tech—OpenAI entered the price war with full force.
Why It Matters:
Smarter Thinking with Visuals: o4-mini-high can process both text and images together to draw scientific conclusions—imagine understanding a complex physics poster and linking it to the latest research in seconds.
Smarter Learning: Using something called Reinforcement Learning Scaling, the model gets better the more time and resources you give it. In the AIME 2025 competition, o4-mini-high actually beat O1—at the same cost!
Total Value for Money:
Massive Cost Cut: Using o4-mini-high costs just 7% of what O1 did. Pro users get full access, and even free users can try a medium-level version.
Speed & Accuracy Boost: Average response time is down to 7.7 seconds—24% faster than the o1-mini—and it now has a 61% success rate in coding contests, nearly matching human engineers.
2.AI War Goes Global: OpenAI vs DeepSeek
The global AI race isn’t just about intelligence—it’s also about economics and accessibility. And right now, China’s DeepSeek-R1 is giving OpenAI a serious headache.
DeepSeek’s Advantage:
Free & Flexible: Users get 50 free messages a day. Plus, it supports self-reflection, making it great for hospitals and colleges in underfunded regions—especially in countries like India.
Market Shockwave: By using cheap chips and smart design, DeepSeek caused a major ripple effect. Nvidia reportedly lost a staggering 4.27 trillion yuan (approx ₹49 lakh crore) in market value in a single day.
OpenAI’s Counter Moves:
Open Source Plans: Sam Altman announced a “full-blood” version of o3 will be open-sourced soon to win back developers worldwide.
All-in-One Ecosystem: o4-mini-high now supports integrated search, Python coding, and image generation. It even open-sourced its Codex CLI tool, making natural language-driven programming a breeze.
3.The Future: Free AI and the “Tech for All” Era
We’re entering a new phase—AI is becoming more democratic and accessible. But there are challenges too.
The Free AI :
Profit Pressure: Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Alibaba, and ByteDance are offering large AI models for free. OpenAI is trying to match that with price cuts, but it’s bleeding money—losing $3.4 billion a year.
Ethics in Focus: In healthcare, for example, O1’s 92.8% accuracy made it ideal for critical cases. But it limited users to 50 responses a week, which isn’t practical in high-volume settings. DeepSeek’s flexibility has filled that gap.
Hybrid Future?
There’s a growing push among researchers to mix open and closed models: let DeepSeek handle regular tasks and leave critical ones to high-accuracy tools like O1. This “hybrid intelligence” approach could be the future, especially in sensitive sectors like medicine.
What Lies Ahead?
As Sam Altman puts it, “O4-mini-high is just the beginning.” The real game-changer could be the upcoming full-strength O3. But unless OpenAI cracks the code on open-sourcing and cost management, it risks being overtaken by DeepSeek and the fast-rising Chinese AI industry.
Because in today’s AI world, there’s no permanent king—only those who can balance cutting-edge tech and market-friendly strategy will survive.
With o4-mini-high in the ring, the AI war has officially shifted gears—from being about raw power to performance per rupee.