OpenAI rushed to defend its market position Friday with the release of o3-mini, a direct response to Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 model that sent shockwaves through the AI industry by matching top-tier performance at a fraction of the computational cost.
“We’re releasing OpenAI o3-mini, the newest, most cost-efficient model in our reasoning series, available in both ChatGPT and the API today” OpenAI said in an official blog post. “Previewed in December 2024, this powerful and fast model advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve (…) all while maintaining the low cost and reduced latency of OpenAI o1-mini.”
OpenAI also made reasoning capabilities available for free to users for the first time while tripling daily message limits for paying customers, from 50 to 150, to boost the usage of the new family of reasoning models.
Unlike GPT-4o and the GPT family of models, the “o” family of AI models is focused on reasoning tasks. They’re less creative, but have embedded chain of thought reasoning that makes them more capable of solving complex problems, backtracking on wrong analyses, and building better structure code.
At the highest level, OpenAI has two main families of AI models: Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and “Omni” (o).
