GPT-4.1 Mini vs Llama 4 Scout

Head-to-head by test (our 12-test suite):

• Strategic analysis: GPT-4.1 Mini 4 vs Llama 4 Scout 2 — GPT wins; GPT ranks 27 of 54, Scout ranks 44 of 54. This matters for nuanced tradeoff reasoning and numeric decisions.
• Constrained rewriting: GPT-4.1 Mini 4 vs Scout 3 — GPT wins and ranks 6 of 53, indicating better compression within hard character limits.
• Persona consistency: GPT-4.1 Mini 5 vs Scout 3 — GPT wins, tied for 1st (36 others) for maintaining character and resisting injection.
• Agentic planning: GPT-4.1 Mini 4 vs Scout 2 — GPT wins and ranks 16 of 54 vs Scout at 53 of 54, so GPT is measurably better at goal decomposition and failure recovery.
• Multilingual: GPT-4.1 Mini 5 vs Scout 4 — GPT wins (tied for 1st), so expect higher parity across non-English outputs.
• Classification: GPT-4.1 Mini 3 vs Scout 4 — Llama 4 Scout wins and is tied for 1st with many models, making it the better pick for routing and labeling tasks in our tests.
• Ties (no clear winner in our suite): structured output 4/4, creative problem solving 3/3, tool calling 4/4, faithfulness 4/4, long context 5/5, safety calibration 2/2. Notably both models tie for 1st on long context (tied with 36 others), so both handle 30K+ retrieval scenarios well. Additional external data for GPT-4.1 Mini (Epoch AI): MATH Level 5 = 87.3% and AIME 2025 = 44.7%. Use those as supplementary evidence of GPT-4.1 Mini's stronger math performance in external benchmarks. Overall, GPT-4.1 Mini wins more tasks in our tests (5 wins vs 1), but many categories are tied, and Llama 4 Scout's single win on classification is decisive for high-volume labeling workloads.

Per the payload, GPT-4.1 Mini charges $0.40/mtok input and $1.60/mtok output; Llama 4 Scout charges $0.08/mtok input and $0.30/mtok output. Output-only cost examples: at 1M output tokens/month GPT-4.1 Mini = $1.60 vs Llama 4 Scout = $0.30; at 10M = $16.00 vs $3.00; at 100M = $160.00 vs $30.00. If you account for equal input+output volume (1:1), totals are: 1M => $2.00 (GPT) vs $0.38 (Llama); 10M => $20.00 vs $3.80; 100M => $200.00 vs $38.00. The price ratio in the payload is 5.33x; large-scale inference or high-throughput classification pipelines should prefer Llama 4 Scout to cut costs. Teams that need the stronger capabilities cited below should budget the higher spend for GPT-4.1 Mini.

Choose GPT-4.1 Mini if you need: persona-consistent assistants, stronger agentic planning and strategic reasoning, better multilingual output, tighter constrained rewriting, or higher math scores (MATH Level 5 = 87.3%, AIME 2025 = 44.7% per payload). Choose Llama 4 Scout if you need: the lowest inference cost at scale (output $0.30/mtok vs $1.60/mtok), best classification performance in our tests (classification score 4, tied for 1st), or are running very high token-volume production pipelines where every dollar per million tokens matters.