Is GPT-4o good enough for production, or should I wait for the next model?

Detailed Answer

GPT-4o has been the production workhorse of OpenAI's API for most of 2025-2026. It is fast, multimodal, supports structured outputs, and has well-understood cost and rate-limit behavior. The newer o-series reasoning models add real capability for hard reasoning tasks but at higher latency and cost. The honest answer: don't wait. GPT-4o is mature, cheap, and ships today. If you build a feature on it, you can route the hardest 5% of requests to a reasoning model without rewriting anything. The trap teams fall into is delaying shipping to wait for a model that solves a problem their current data already explains.