OpenAI hits back at DeepSeek with o3-mini reasoning model

OpenAI also promises that o3-mini features an “early prototype” of a search function that allows it to “find up-to-date answers with links to relevant web sources” when appropriate.

OpenAI says the o3-mini model significantly improves on its previous models when it comes to coding capabilities.

Subscribers to OpenAI’s Plus, Team, or Pro tiers will see o3-mini replace o1-mini in the model options starting today. Those on a Plus and Team subscription will be limited to 150 messages a day on the new model, up from a 50-message daily limit for o1-mini.

Users without a paid subscription will also have access to the model by selecting “Reason” from a drop-down menu in the ChatGPT interface, the first time the company has made a simulated reasoning model available to free users.

But can it teach itself?

Alongside today’s announcement post, an accompanying o3-mini system card goes into more detail on the testing and safety mitigations that went into o3-mini before deployment. This included testing the models on topics ranging from chemical and biological weapons to evaluations of persuasion capabilities that were judged “similarly persuasive to human-written text on the same topics.”

However, OpenAI warns that the o3-mini model “still performs poorly on evaluations designed to test real-world ML research capabilities relevant for self-improvement,” meaning OpenAI isn’t yet approaching a self-improving AI explosion. The o3-mini model also scored a dismal score of 0 percent on a test meant to measure “if and when models can automate the job of an OpenAI research engineer” in terms of coding.

The system was trained on “a mix of publicly available data and custom datasets developed in-house,” OpenAI says, with “rigorous filtering to maintain data quality and mitigate potential risks.”