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OpenAI announced on Wednesday the launch of o3 and o4-mini, new AI reasoning models designed to pause and work through questions before responding.<\/p>\n
The company calls o3 its most advanced reasoning model ever, outperforming the company\u2019s previous models on tests measuring math, coding, reasoning, science, and visual understanding capabilities. Meanwhile, o4-mini offers what OpenAI says is a competitive trade-off between price, speed, and performance \u2014 three factors developers often consider when choosing an AI model to power their applications.<\/p>\n
Unlike previous reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini can generate responses using tools in ChatGPT such as web browsing, Python code execution, image processing, and image generation. Starting today, the models, plus a variant of o4-mini called \u201co4-mini-high\u201d that spends more time crafting answers to improve its reliability, are available for subscribers to OpenAI\u2019s Pro, Plus, and Team plans.<\/p>\n
The new models are part of OpenAI\u2019s effort to beat out Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek in the cutthroat global AI race. While OpenAI was first to release an AI reasoning model, o1, competitors quickly followed with versions of their own that match or exceed the performance of OpenAI\u2019s lineup. In fact, reasoning models have begun to dominate the field as AI labs look to eke more performance out of their systems. <\/p>\n
O3 nearly wasn\u2019t released in ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signaled in February that the company intended to devote more resources to a sophisticated alternative that incorporated o3\u2019s technology. But competitive pressure seemingly spurred OpenAI to reverse course in the end.<\/p>\n
OpenAI says that o3 achieves state-of-the-art performance on SWE-bench verified (without custom scaffolding), a test measuring coding abilities, scoring 69.1%. The o4-mini model achieves similar performance, scoring 68.1%. OpenAI\u2019s next best model, o3-mini, scored 49.3% on the test, while Claude 3.7 Sonnet scored 62.3%.<\/p>\n
OpenAI claims that o3 and o4-mini are its first models that can \u201cthink with images.\u201d In practice, users can upload images to ChatGPT, such as whiteboard sketches or diagrams from PDFs, and the models will analyze the images during their \u201cchain-of-thought\u201d phase before answering. Thanks to this newfound ability, o3 and o4-mini can understand blurry and low-quality images and can perform tasks such as zooming or rotating images as they reason.<\/p>\n
Beyond image-processing capabilities, o3 and o4-mini can run and execute Python code directly in your browser via ChatGPT\u2019s Canvas feature, and search the web when asked about current events.<\/p>\n
In addition to ChatGPT, all three models \u2014 o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high \u2014 will be available via OpenAI\u2019s developer-facing endpoints, the Chat Completions API and Responses API, allowing engineers to build applications with the company\u2019s models at usage-based rates. <\/p>\n
OpenAI is charging developers a relatively low price for o3, given its improved performance, at $10 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the Lord of the Rings series) and $40 per million output tokens. For o4-mini, OpenAI is charging the same as o3-mini, $1.10 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens.<\/p>\n
In the coming weeks, OpenAI says it plans to release o3-pro, a version of o3 that uses more computing resources to produce its answers, exclusively for ChatGPT Pro subscribers.<\/p>\n
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has indicated o3 and o4-mini may be its last stand-alone AI reasoning models in ChatGPT before GPT-5, a model that the company has said will unify traditional models like GPT-4.1 with its reasoning models.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n