---
type: entity
subtype: tool
title: "GPT-4"
description: "OpenAI's model cited as strong enough that it reasons step by step without being told to."
resource: "https://openai.com/gpt-4"
tags: [llm, openai, model-access]
videos: [3-most-important-prompt-engineering-techniques-you-need-to-know, how-to-use-gpt4-to-grow-on-twitter-the-right-way]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# GPT-4

GPT-4 is OpenAI's flagship model from the era when Cole was teaching prompting, and he holds it up as the example of a model strong enough to reason on its own. Demonstrating [chain-of-thought](../../concepts/effective-prompting.md), he points out it needs no prompting to think step by step: "with something like GPT-4 it already does that really well in fact ... it literally started the response with let's think this through step by step" [0:08:14]. That self-directed reasoning is what separates GPT-4 from weaker models that must be explicitly told to slow down.

## How Cole uses it

GPT-4 is the premium model in his early tutorials, the one worth paying for when quality matters. Introducing it he notes both its strength and its cost/access at the time: "I'm going to be using the GPT-4 model which is the OpenAI's strongest and most recent model that isn't quite available to all the public yet I have to pay just twenty dollars a month" [0:02:59]. He uses it as the engine behind practical [prompt-engineering](../../concepts/prompt-engineering.md) demos, including a Twitter-growth workflow, showing how [role prompting](../../concepts/role-prompting.md) and well-structured requests get the most out of it.

Because GPT-4 already reasons step by step, Cole uses it to make a teaching point about [effective prompting](../../concepts/effective-prompting.md): techniques like "let's think this through step by step" help weaker models more than they help GPT-4, which has that behavior baked in. In later videos it remains the closed-model quality bar (later joined by GPT-4o) that open models like Llama are measured against.

## Realizes

- [Prompt Engineering](../../concepts/prompt-engineering.md) - The craft of wording, structuring, and constraining a prompt so an LLM reliably produces the answer you want.
- [Effective Prompting](../../concepts/effective-prompting.md) - Keeping prompts simple, specific, and high-quality, and knowing when prompt tricks matter versus when they're overrated.
- [Role Prompting](../../concepts/role-prompting.md) - Assigning the model a specific role or persona to set the tone and expectations for its response.
- [Few-Shot Prompting](../../concepts/few-shot-prompting.md) - Including a handful of concrete input/output examples in the prompt so the model infers the desired pattern instead of relying on instructions alone.
- [Adversarial Agents](../../concepts/adversarial-agents.md) - Pitting a generator against an adversarial critic so an agent's output is stress-tested before it's accepted.
- [Structured Outputs](../../concepts/structured-outputs.md) - Constraining LLM output to a validated schema (with retries on failure) so downstream code can rely on its shape.

## Works with

- [ChatGPT](./chatgpt.md) - The AI chat model used throughout as the example interface for prompting, the surface GPT-4 powers.

## Contrasts with

- [Claude](./claude.md) - Named as an example of a large language model that can be turned into an agent, the closed-model rival Cole benchmarks against.
- [Llama](./llama.md) - The open LLM model powering the agent, the open challenger measured against GPT-4's quality bar.
- [GPT-3.5 Turbo](./gpt-3-5-turbo.md) - OpenAI's ChatGPT-era chat-completion model called by the proxy server to generate the text that replaces the user's selection in place.

## Related

- [GPT-4o](./gpt-4o.md) - Cited as the more expensive, more powerful model to route complicated requests to in a cost-routing setup.
- [GPT-4o mini](./gpt-4o-mini.md) - A fast, cheap OpenAI model cited as a speed benchmark; Quasar Alpha runs the MCP agent army even faster than it.

## Sources

- [3 MOST Important Prompt Engineering Techniques you NEED to know!](../../sources/3-most-important-prompt-engineering-techniques-you-need-to-know.md) - "[0:08:14] with something like GPT-4 it already does that really well in fact... it literally started the response with let's think this through step by step"
- [How to Use GPT4 To Grow on Twitter The Right Way](../../sources/how-to-use-gpt4-to-grow-on-twitter-the-right-way.md) - "[0:02:59] I'm going to be using the GPT-4 model which is the OpenAI's strongest and most recent model ... I have to pay just twenty dollars a month"
