GPT-4 Turbo Review: Specs, Pricing & Shutdown Date

GPT-4 Turbo is the faster, cheaper version of GPT-4 that OpenAI unveiled at its DevDay event on November 6, 2023. It brought a 128,000-token context window, fresher knowledge, and prices up to three times lower than GPT-4, and it powered ChatGPT Plus until GPT-4o took over in May 2024. Now OpenAI is retiring it: the model shuts down in the API on October 23, 2026.

This GPT-4 Turbo review covers what the model offered, how it compared with GPT-4 and GPT-4o, what it cost, what its shutdown means, and which models to use instead. GPT-4 Turbo is not available in Chat Smith, but its successor GPT-4o and newer OpenAI models are.

GPT-4 Turbo is an upgraded version of the original GPT-4. OpenAI kept GPT-4's reasoning ability but made it faster and cheaper to run, raised the context window from 8,000 or 32,000 tokens to 128,000, and moved its knowledge cutoff forward from September 2021 to April 2023.

It came in several versions. The first preview arrived in November 2023, a January 2024 update reduced cases where the model gave "lazy" partial answers, and the generally available version in April 2024 added built-in vision and extended its knowledge to December 2023. Every version could write up to 4,096 tokens per response.

GPT-4o replaced GPT-4 Turbo as ChatGPT's main model in May 2024, and OpenAI has since scheduled its API shutdown for October 23, 2026, pointing developers to newer GPT-5 models. Our full list of ChatGPT models shows how the lineup has moved on.

Four upgrades made GPT-4 Turbo a big step up from GPT-4.

GPT-4 Turbo could read about 128,000 tokens at once, roughly 300 pages of text. That made it possible to work with full reports, long chat histories, or large code files without splitting them up, the kind of job an AI PDF summarizer handles today.

At $10 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, GPT-4 Turbo cost three times less for input and half as much for output as GPT-4. For businesses running GPT-4-level AI at scale, that cut costs sharply without a drop in quality.

GPT-4 Turbo introduced JSON mode, which guarantees valid JSON output, along with parallel function calling, so the model could trigger several tools in one response. A seed parameter also made outputs more reproducible, which helped developers test and debug their apps.

The April 2024 version merged image understanding into the main model, so it could read charts, screenshots, and photos through the same API. It also improved math and reasoning, scoring 86.5% on MMLU and 72.6% on the MATH benchmark, useful for the kind of step-by-step problems an AI math solver works through.

The table compares GPT-4 Turbo with the model it improved on and the model that replaced it. Prices are OpenAI's API rates per million tokens.

GPT-4o matched GPT-4 Turbo's intelligence at a quarter of its input price, added voice, and answered faster, which is why it replaced Turbo so quickly. Our GPT-4o review covers its successor in detail.

GPT-4 Turbo's API price stayed at $10 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens throughout its life. Here is how its availability has changed:

Chat Smith does not offer GPT-4 Turbo, but it includes GPT-4o and newer OpenAI models alongside models from Google, Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek. Free accounts include limited use, and Chat Smith Pro raises usage limits for $9.99 per month or $39.99 per year.

The most urgent issue is the shutdown. After October 23, 2026, any app or script that still calls gpt-4-turbo will stop working, so developers should switch to a current model before that date and retest their prompts.

Even before that, GPT-4 Turbo had clear limits. Its knowledge stops in 2023, it can only write about 4,000 tokens per reply, and it has no reasoning mode for hard multi-step problems. Early versions were also criticized for cutting answers short.

It is also expensive by today's standards. GPT-5, covered in our GPT-5 review, costs $1.25 per million input tokens, an eighth of Turbo's price, with a larger context window and much stronger reasoning.

If you relied on GPT-4 Turbo, Chat Smith gives you newer options on Android, iOS, and the web with no OpenAI account needed. Pick one from the model list and start chatting.

GPT-4o is the closest match for GPT-4 Turbo's style and multimodal skills. For stronger reasoning on long documents and complex analysis, try GPT-5.6 Sol or OpenAI's newer GPT-6 Sol.

You can also compare OpenAI's answers with fast models from other labs, such as Gemini 3.5 Flash, and keep the one that holds up. For research-heavy questions, the built-in Deep Research feature runs advanced search and reasoning across sources.

GPT-4 Turbo made GPT-4-level AI practical: a 128K context window, much lower prices, JSON mode, function calling, and built-in vision. It set the template that GPT-4o and later models built on.

With its API shutdown on October 23, 2026, though, it is time to switch. You can try its successors side by side in Chat Smith, an AI chatbot that puts OpenAI's latest models next to those from Anthropic, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek.