OpenAI o3

o3

Developer(s)	OpenAI
Predecessor	OpenAI o1
Type	Generative pre-trained transformer

OpenAI o3 is a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model developed by OpenAI as a successor to OpenAI o1. It is designed to devote additional deliberation time when addressing questions that require step-by-step logical reasoning.[1][2]

History

The OpenAI o3 model was announced on December 20, 2024, with the designation "o3" chosen to avoid trademark conflict with the mobile carrier brand named O2. The model is available in two versions: o3 and o3-mini. OpenAI invited safety and security researchers to apply for early access of these models until January 10, 2025.[1][3] OpenAI plans to release o3-mini to the public in January 2025.[4] o3-mini features three compute levels: low, medium and high.[5] OpenAI has not yet announced how much it will cost for users.

Capabilities

Reinforcement learning was used to teach o3 to "think" before generating answers, using what OpenAI refers to as a "private chain of thought". This approach enables the model to plan ahead and reason through tasks, performing a series of intermediate reasoning steps to assist in solving the problem, at the cost of additional computing power and increased latency of responses.[6]

o3 demonstrates significantly better performance than o1 on complex tasks, including coding, mathematics, and science.[1] OpenAI reported that o3 achieved a score of 87.7% on the GPQA Diamond benchmark, which contains expert-level science questions not publicly available online.[7]

On SWE-bench Verified, a software engineering benchmark assessing the ability to solve real GitHub issues, o3 scored 71.7%, compared to 48.9% for o1. On Codeforces, o3 reached an Elo score of 2727, whereas o1 scored 1891.[7]

On the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) benchmark, which evaluates an AI's ability to handle new, challenging logical and skill acquisition problems, o3 attained three times the accuracy of o1.[1][8]

References

1. Knight, Will (December 20, 2024). "OpenAI Upgrades Its Smartest AI Model With Improved Reasoning Skills". Wired.
2. Metz, Cade (December 20, 2024). "OpenAI Unveils New A.l. That Can 'Reason' Through Math and Science Problems". The New York Times.
3. "Early access for safety testing". OpenAI. December 20, 2024.
4. Edwards, Benj (December 20, 2024). "OpenAI announces o3 and o3-mini, its next simulated reasoning models". Ars Technica.
5. Mauran, Cecily (December 20, 2024). "OpenAI announces o3 and o3 mini reasoning models". Mashable. Retrieved January 7, 2025.
6. Zeff, Maxwell; Wiggers, Kyle (December 20, 2024). "OpenAI announces new o3 models". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 22, 2024.
7. Franzen, Carl; David, Emilia (December 20, 2024). "OpenAI confirms new frontier models o3 and o3-mini". VentureBeat. Retrieved December 26, 2024.
8. Hsu, Jeremy (December 20, 2024). "OpenAI's o3 model aced a test of AI reasoning – but it's still not AGI". New Scientist. Retrieved December 22, 2024.