The Day GPT-4 Stopped Being the Default

By C.W. Jameson · Published 15 April 2026 · Last reviewed 15 April 2026

For fourteen months, GPT-4 was the only serious choice. Then Anthropic benchmarked past it on a Tuesday, and the market never went back.

How Claude 3 Opus and Gemini 1.5 Pro ended the era of GPT-4 as the unquestioned frontier standard in March 2024.