The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers

Summary

The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers 8th August 2025 I’ve been dipping into the r/ChatGPT subreddit recently to see how people are reacting to the GPT-5 launch, and so far the vibes there are not good. This AMA thread with the OpenAI team is a great illustration of the single biggest complaint: a lot of people are very unhappy to lose access to the much older GPT-4o, previously ChatGPT’s default model for most users. A big surprise for me yesterday was that OpenAI simultaneously retired access to their older models as they rolled out GPT-5, at least in their consumer apps. Here’s a snippet from their August 7th 2025 release notes: When GPT-5 launches, several older models will be retired, including GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1-mini, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o3, o3-pro. If you open a conversation that used one of these models, ChatGPT will automatically switch it to the closest GPT-5 equivalent. Chats with 4o, 4.1, 4.5, 4.1-mini, o4-mini, or o4-mini-high will open in GPT-5, chats with o3 will open in GPT-5-Thinking, and chats with o3-Pro will open in GPT-5-Pro (available only on Pro and Team). There’s no deprecation period at all: when your consumer ChatGPT account gets GPT-5, those older models cease to be available. One of the expressed goals for GPT-5 was to escape the terrible UX of the model picker. Asking users to pick between GPT-4o and o3 and o4-mini was a notoriously bad UX, and resulted in many users sticking with that default 4o model—now a year old—and hence not being exposed to the advances in model capabilities over the last twelve months. GPT-5’s solution is to automatically pick the underlying model based on the prompt. On paper this sounds great—users don’t have to think about models any more, and should get upgraded to the best available model depending on the complexity of their question. I’m already getting the sense that this is not a welcome approach for power users. It makes responses much less predictable as the model se...