---
type: entity
subtype: tool
title: "GPT-4o mini"
description: "A fast, cheap OpenAI model cited as a speed benchmark; Quasar Alpha runs the MCP agent army even faster than it."
resource: "https://openai.com"
tags: [llm, openai]
videos: [brand-new-stealth-llm-released-on-openrouter-its-a-beast, llama-32-is-insane-but-does-it-beat-gpt-as-an-ai-agent]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# GPT-4o mini

GPT-4o mini is OpenAI's small, cheap, fast model, and across Cole's videos it functions as the practical default for lightweight agent work and, notably, as the speed benchmark other models get measured against. When testing a stealth model on OpenRouter he anchors the comparison to it directly: "I was using GPT-4o mini for my model for this agent and Quasar Alpha is actually faster than even GPT-4o mini which is generally known to be one of the fastest close source llms." That "one of the fastest closed-source LLMs" framing is why it keeps showing up: it is the yardstick for latency.

Its second role is as a capable-enough cheap driver for tool-using agents. Putting it head to head with a local open model, Cole finds it holds up well: "GPT-4o mini is pretty impressive overall so I think you'll be surprised the kind of things that it's actually able to do." But he is honest about its ceiling, catching it fumble a task in the same test ("it decided to download the 825 meeting notes four times I'm not sure why it did that"), which is exactly the kind of small-model reliability wobble that shapes his [Model Selection](../../concepts/model-selection.md) advice.

As the low-cost tier of the OpenAI lineup, GPT-4o mini is the counterpart to the flagship [GPT-4o](./gpt-4o.md): the model you hand the simple, high-volume requests to before escalating anything hard. It is also the closed-model foil in Cole's [local LLMs as agents](../../concepts/local-llms-as-agents.md) experiments, the commercial baseline that open models like Llama 3.2 are trying to beat, and it is reachable, like everything else, through [OpenRouter](./openrouter.md).

## Realizes

- [Model Selection](../../concepts/model-selection.md) - Choosing the right LLM per task by trading off quality, speed, and cost, often routing easy requests to cheap models and hard ones to expensive models.
- [Tool Use](../../concepts/tool-use.md) - Letting an LLM invoke external functions and APIs so it can take actions and fetch data beyond its parametric knowledge.
- [Local LLMs as Agents](../../concepts/local-llms-as-agents.md) - Using openly downloadable, self-hosted models for agentic work, which hinges on the model's ability to do reliable function calling.
- [The Agent Loop (Reason-Act-Observe)](../../concepts/agent-loop.md) - The core agentic cycle where the LLM reasons, calls a tool, observes the result, and loops until it decides to respond.
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)](../../concepts/rag.md) - Grounding an LLM's answers by retrieving relevant documents from an external knowledge base and injecting them into the prompt at query time.
- [Provider Independence](../../concepts/provider-independence.md) - Architecting agents so the underlying model, framework, or client can be swapped without a rewrite, avoiding lock-in through low-level abstractions.

## Contrasts with

- [Llama](./llama.md) - The open LLM model powering the agent, the local open model tested as a challenger to it.
- [GPT-4.1 Nano](./gpt-4-1-nano.md) - OpenAI's smallest, cheapest model in the GPT-4.1 line, used for the per-chunk context-generation call in contextual retrieval because the task needs almost no reasoning power.
- [GPT-5.4 Mini & Nano](./gpt-5-4-mini-nano.md) - OpenAI's small/fast model releases marketed explicitly for subagents and AI coding; nano reportedly beats Claude Haiku 4.5 at a fifth the price and ~188 tok/s, anchoring the "subagent era" thesis.

## Works with

- [OpenRouter](./openrouter.md) - Unified API gateway to many LLMs, the gateway used to swap it for cheaper or faster models.

## Related

- [GPT-4o](./gpt-4o.md) - Cited as the more expensive, more powerful model to route complicated requests to in a cost-routing setup.

## Sources

- [BRAND NEW "Stealth" LLM Released on OpenRouter (It's a BEAST)](../../sources/brand-new-stealth-llm-released-on-openrouter-its-a-beast.md) - "[0:09:20] I was using GPT-4o mini for my model for this agent and Quasar Alpha is actually faster than even GPT-4o mini which is generally known to be one of the fastest close source llms"
- [Llama 3.2 is INSANE - But Does it Beat GPT as an AI Agent?](../../sources/llama-32-is-insane-but-does-it-beat-gpt-as-an-ai-agent.md) - "[0:07:09] GPT-4o mini is pretty impressive overall so I think you'll be surprised the kind of things that it's actually able to do"
