GPT-4.1 is a capable model, especially for structured outputs and tool calling. I’ve been using LLMs for my day to day grunt work for two years now and this is my goto as a great combination of cheap and capable.
I'll switch to o4-mini when I'm writing code, but otherwise 4.1-mini usually does a great job.
Fun example from earlier today:
llm -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/refs/heads/main/main.css \
-s 'explain all the tricks used by this CSS'
The code is clearly written but entirely uncommented: https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/blob/main/mai...
GPT-4.1 mini's explanation is genuinely excellent: https://gist.github.com/simonw/cafd612b3982e3ad463788dd50287... - it correctly identifies "This CSS uses modern CSS features at an expert level to create a 3D interactive voxel-style UI while minimizing or eliminating JavaScript" and explains a bunch of tricks I hadn't figured out.
And it used 3,813 input tokens and 1,291 output tokens - https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=3813&ot=1291&ic=0.4&oc=1.6 - that's 0.3591 cents (around a third of a cent).
How come it doesn't know for sure?
Though it's worth noting that CSS Minecraft was first released three years ago, so there's a chance it has hints about it in the training data already. This is not a meticulous experiment.
(I've had a search around though and the most detailed explanation I could find of how that code works is the one I posted on my blog yesterday - my hunch is that it figured it out from the code alone.)
Are you aware of any user interfaces that expose some limited ChatGPT functionality using a UI, that internally uses llm. This is for my non-techie wife.
I've been meaning to put together a web UI for ages, I think that's the next big project now that tools is out.
It's not using LLM, but right now one of the best UI options out there is https://openwebui.com/ - it works really well with Ollama (and any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint).