o4 Mini
VerifiedOpenAI's compact multimodal model for image, text, and file tasks.
About o4 Mini
o4 Mini combines vision and language capabilities in a single system developed by OpenAI. It processes images alongside text and files inside a 200,000-token context window. The architecture remains closed-source with no public parameter count.
Its design emphasizes efficient handling of mixed-modality inputs without requiring open weights. This enables consistent performance on tasks that blend visual and textual data over long contexts.
Typical usage includes document review that merges images with surrounding text and file-based analysis requiring extended context retention. Developers integrate it into applications needing unified multimodal understanding.
Capabilities
How o4 Mini compares
o4 Mini (striped bar) vs other multimodal on intelligence, speed and price.
Price
USD per 1M output tokens · Lower is better · o4 Mini ranks #70 of 124
Sources: Artificial Analysis (intelligence, speed) · OpenRouter (price).
Best for
Long-form Video Analysis
o4 Mini excels at processing extended video sequences with accompanying transcripts or annotations, using its multimodal inputs and 200,000-token context to deliver coherent summaries and insights across hours of content.
Multimodal Document Review
The model handles lengthy reports containing text, charts, and images while preserving context across the full document, making it effective for comprehensive analysis and cross-referencing.
Extended Visual Reasoning Chains
It supports complex tasks that integrate visual data over long sequences, such as interpreting diagrams and figures within extensive research papers or technical documentation.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- +Handles extended contexts efficiently
- +Integrates vision with text and files
- +Balanced performance for multimodal queries
- +Practical for document-heavy workflows
Limitations
- –Smaller scale may limit depth on complex problems
- –Reasoning can be less robust than full-size models
- –File processing depends on input clarity
Cost calculator
Estimate what o4 Mini would cost for your usage.
Based on o4 Mini's $1.10/1M input · $4.40/1M output. Estimate only — actual cost varies by provider and caching.
Quick start
OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. Only the model slug changes between models.
import OpenAI from "openai";
const client = new OpenAI({
baseURL: "https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
apiKey: process.env.OPENROUTER_API_KEY,
});
const completion = await client.chat.completions.create({
model: "openai/o4-mini",
messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello!" }],
});
console.log(completion.choices[0].message.content);Model slug: openai/o4-mini
Editor's verdict
o4 Mini is OpenAI's proprietary multimodal with a 200K-token context window.
At $4.40 per 1M output tokens, it is mid-priced for its class.
It is available through OpenAI's API and aggregators like OpenRouter.
Best suited to handles extended contexts efficiently and integrates vision with text and files.
Frequently asked questions
o4 Mini provides a context length of 200,000 tokens.
User reviews
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