OpenAI has unveiled two new AI reasoning models: o3 and o4-mini. These models are designed to pause and carefully work through questions before providing responses. According to OpenAI, these new AI models are the smartest models they’ve released to date.
The o3 model is OpenAI’s most powerful reasoning model, outperforming previous models in key areas like math, coding, reasoning, science, and visual understanding. It achieves top-tier performance in coding tests, scoring 69.1% on the SWE-bench verified test, a significant improvement compared to earlier models.
Meanwhile, o4-mini offers a balanced mix of price, speed, and performance. “OpenAI o4-mini is a smaller model optimized for fast, cost-efficient reasoning—it achieves remarkable performance for its size and cost, particularly in math, coding, and visual tasks,” the AI giant said in a blogpost.
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One of the key features of both o3 and o4-mini is their ability to generate responses by combining every tool in ChatGPT, such as web browsing, Python code execution, and image processing. These models are also the first from OpenAI to think with images.
“People can upload a photo of a whiteboard, a textbook diagram, or a hand-drawn sketch, and the model can interpret it—even if the image is blurry, reversed, or low quality. With tool use, the models can manipulate images on the fly—rotating, zooming, or transforming them as part of their reasoning process,” the company added.
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Starting today, ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users will see o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high in the model selector, replacing the previous options: o1, o3-mini, and o3-mini-high. ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu users will gain access in one week. Free users can try o4-mini by selecting ‘Think’ in the composer before submitting their query.
In the future, OpenAI plans to release o3-pro. With the new models, OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of AI.