Exciting news from OpenAI—the highly anticipated o3-mini model is now available in ChatGPT and the API, offering groundbreaking capabilities for a wide range of use cases, particularly in science, math, and coding. First previewed in December 2024, o3-mini is designed to push the boundaries of what small models can achieve while keeping costs low and maintaining the fast response times that users have come to expect from o1-mini.
Key Features of OpenAI o3-mini:
🔹 Next-Level Reasoning for STEM Tasks
o3-mini delivers exceptional STEM reasoning performance, with particular strength in science, math, and coding. It maintains the cost efficiency and low latency of its predecessor, o1-mini, but packs a much stronger punch in terms of reasoning power and accuracy.
🔹 Developer-Friendly Features
For developers, o3-mini introduces a host of highly-requested features:
- Function Calling
- Structured Outputs
- Developer Messages
These features make o3-mini production-ready right out of the gate. Additionally, developers can select from three reasoning effort options—low, medium, and high—allowing for fine-tuned control over performance. Whether you’re prioritizing speed or accuracy, o3-mini has you covered.
🔹 Search Integration for Up-to-Date Answers
For the first time, o3-mini works with search, enabling it to provide up-to-date answers along with links to relevant web sources. This integration is part of OpenAI’s ongoing effort to incorporate real-time search across their reasoning models, and while it’s still in an early prototype stage, it’s a step towards an even smarter, more responsive model.
🔹 Enhanced Access for Paid Users
Pro, Team, and Plus users will have triple the rate limits compared to o1-mini, with up to 150 messages per day instead of the 50 available on the earlier model. Plus, all paid users can select o3-mini-high, which offers a higher-intelligence version with slightly longer response times, ensuring Pro users have unlimited access to both o3-mini and o3-mini-high.
🔹 Free Users Can Try o3-mini!
For the first time, free users can also explore o3-mini in ChatGPT by simply selecting the ‘Reason’ button in the message composer or regenerating a response. This brings access to high-performance reasoning capabilities previously only available to paid users.
🔹 Optimized for Precision & Speed
o3-mini is optimized for technical domains, where precision and speed are key. When set to medium reasoning effort, it delivers the same high performance as o1 on complex tasks but with much faster response times. In fact, evaluations show that o3-mini produces clearer, more accurate answers with a 39% reduction in major errors compared to o1-mini.
A Model Built for Technical Excellence
Whether you’re tackling challenging problems in math, coding, or science, o3-mini is designed to give you faster, more precise results. Expert testers have found that o3-mini beats o1-mini in 56% of cases, particularly when it comes to real-world, difficult questions like those found in AIME and GPQA evaluations. It’s a clear choice for tasks that require a blend of intelligence and speed.
Rolling Out to Developers and Users
Starting today, o3-mini is rolling out in the Chat Completions API, Assistants API, and Batch API to developers in API usage tiers 3-5. ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users have access starting now, with Enterprise access coming in February.
This model will replace o1-mini in the model picker, making it the go-to choice for STEM reasoning, logical problem-solving, and coding tasks.
OpenAI o3-mini marks a major leap in small model capabilities—delivering both powerful reasoning and cost-efficiency in one package. As OpenAI continues to refine and optimize these models, o3-mini sets a new standard for fast, intelligent, and reliable solutions for developers and users alike.
Competition Math (AIME 2024)
Mathematics: With low reasoning effort, OpenAI o3-mini achieves comparable performance with OpenAI o1-mini, while with medium effort, o3-mini achieves comparable performance with o1. Meanwhile, with high reasoning effort, o3-mini outperforms both OpenAI o1-mini and OpenAI o1, where the gray shaded regions show the performance of majority vote (consensus) with 64 samples.
PhD-level Science Questions (GPQA Diamond)
PhD-level science: On PhD-level biology, chemistry, and physics questions, with low reasoning effort, OpenAI o3-mini achieves performance above OpenAI o1-mini. With high effort, o3-mini achieves comparable performance with o1.
FrontierMath
Research-level mathematics: OpenAI o3-mini with high reasoning performs better than its predecessor on FrontierMath. On FrontierMath, when prompted to use a Python tool, o3-mini with high reasoning effort solves over 32% of problems on the first attempt, including more than 28% of the challenging (T3) problems. These numbers are provisional, and the chart above shows performance without tools or a calculator.
Competition Code (Codeforces)
Competition coding: On Codeforces competitive programming, OpenAI o3-mini achieves progressively higher Elo scores with increased reasoning effort, all outperforming o1-mini. With medium reasoning effort, it matches o1’s performance.
Software Engineering (SWE-bench Verified)
Software engineering: o3-mini is our highest performing released model on SWEbench-verified. For additional datapoints on SWE-bench Verified results with high reasoning effort, including with the open-source Agentless scaffold (39%) and an internal tools scaffold (61%), see our system card.
LiveBench Coding
LiveBench coding: OpenAI o3-mini surpasses o1-high even at medium reasoning effort, highlighting its efficiency in coding tasks. At high reasoning effort, o3-mini further extends its lead, achieving significantly stronger performance across key metrics.
General knowledge
General knowledge: o3-mini outperforms o1-mini in knowledge evaluations across general knowledge domains.
Model speed and performance
With intelligence comparable to OpenAI o1, OpenAI o3-mini delivers faster performance and improved efficiency. Beyond the STEM evaluations highlighted above, o3-mini demonstrates superior results in additional math and factuality evaluations with medium reasoning effort. In A/B testing, o3-mini delivered responses 24% faster than o1-mini, with an average response time of 7.7 seconds compared to 10.16 seconds.
Explore more and try it for yourself: OpenAI o3-mini Announcement
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