The Last Days of GPT-4: A Multimodal Revolution Is Coming for Your Chatbot4 min read·Just now--By now, you’ve probably heard the news: GPT-4 is retiring. Not with a bang, not with a press conference or farewell tour, but with a quiet, graceful exit stage left as GPT-4o — the newer, shinier, more multimodal kid on the block — takes center stage.And if you didn’t hear about it? Congratulations, you’re living a peaceful life, unaware of the existential shifts in AI beneath your feet.Let’s dig in.GPT-4: The Icon That WasIntroduced in March 2023, GPT-4 was more than just a model. It was a cultural moment in AI — an intelligence that could write sonnets, debug code, ace bar exams, and help you draft that email you’ve been avoiding for three days. GPT-4 brought a level of reasoning and creativity that set a new benchmark for what people expected from their digital sidekick.If Siri was the friendly receptionist of the AI world, GPT-4 was your caffeinated genius friend who also happened to be a novelist, programmer, and part-time philosopher.But like all great icons — think vinyl records, floppy disks, and MySpace — it eventually had to make room for the future.Enter: GPT-4o (The “o” Is for “Omni,” Not “Oops”)Starting April 30, 2025, GPT-4 will officially retire from the ChatGPT interface. In its place? GPT-4o. The “o” stands for “omni,” which in this case isn’t just branding fluff — it’s a signal of a truly multimodal model.GPT-4o natively understands text, images, and audio. That means it’s not just reading what you write — it’s looking at what you show it, hearing what you say, and maybe, someday, sensing the emotional undertones of your sighs when you open a spreadsheet at 9 a.m.It’s faster, chattier, and more intuitive. It’s like GPT-4 went away for a sabbatical and came back with a yoga certification, fluent in three more languages, and somehow taller.Why Sunsetting GPT-4 Makes Sense (Even If We’ll Miss It)OpenAI didn’t make this decision on a whim. The shift to GPT-4o reflects a broader strategy: to streamline the…