The GPT-4 wall was the [[phenomenon]] that [[large language model|large language models]] available publicly between early 2023 ([[GPT-4]]'s public release) and 2025 were in most ways not significantly more [[intelligence|intelligent]] than GPT-4-0314 itself. Despite massive advancements in cost optimization, much wider availability of GPT-4-level models, [[inference-time scaling]], and better [[median user preference tuning]], frontier models during the wall period were not significantly better at certain hard tasks, and could sometimes be seen as downgrades relative to GPT-4.