The new o 3-mini reasoning model is free to use
DeepSeek Meets OpenAI: Fast, Cheap, and Smart: Why OpenAI o3-mini is a beast of an AI reasoning platform
Part of the issue stems from OpenAI’s origins as a nonprofit research organization before becoming a profit-seeking powerhouse. The power struggle between the research and product groups has led to a rift between the teams working on advanced reasoning and those working on chat. (OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix says this is “incorrect” and notes that the leaders of these teams, chief product officer Kevin Weil and chief research officer Mark Chen, “meet every week and work closely to align on product and research priorities.”)
“The reinforcement learning [DeepSeek] did is similar to what we did at OpenAI,” says another former OpenAI researcher, “but they did it with better data and cleaner stack.”
One model that can tell if a question requires advanced reasoning is what some inside OpenAI want the company to build. That has not happened so far. A drop-down menu makes users decide whether or not they want to use o1 or GPT-4o.
In response, OpenAI is preparing to launch a new model today, ahead of its originally planned schedule. O3-mini will be in both the chat and the app. Sources say it has o1 level reasoning with 4o-level speed. In other words, it’s fast, cheap, smart, and designed to crush DeepSeek.
Originally announced as part of OpenAI’s 12 days of “ship-mas” in December, o3-mini is designed to match o1’s performance in math, coding, and science, while responding faster than the existing reasoning model. O3-mini should respond 24 percent faster than o1-mini and give more accurate answers. Much like o1-mini, this latest model will show how it worked out an answer, rather than just providing a response.
The company says that the latest model will also incorporate new features, including the ability to tap into web searches, call functions from a user’s code, and toggle between different reasoning levels that trade off speed for problem-solving capabilities.
Questions have been raised about the US government’s strategy to curb China’s rise in artificial intelligence. The US has introduced a number of sanctions over the years to curb China’s ability to access the most advancedNVIDIA chips needed for cutting-edge AI models. The research conducted by DeepSeek described a few types of chips from Nvidy.
OpenAI OpenAI – Open AI vs. DeepSeek R1: What Do You Want to Know About OpenAI? A Job Post from Mercor
Do you work at OpenAI? We would like to hear from you. Will Knight can be reached via a nonwork phone or computer.
The news comes as DeepSeek’s R1 continues to roil the US tech industry. Pressure is being put on Google and Anthropic to lower their prices due to the fact that a powerful model can be released for free.
An example problem that is strikingly similar to the one in the benchmark was given by the job posting.
Mercor, a company used by Openai to find staff for model training, appears to have been recruiting PhD students in other areas as well. A recent job posting from Mercor on LinkedIn states: “The overall goal of this project that you may become a part of is to create challenging scientific coding questions designed to test the capabilities of large language models in generating code for solving realistic scientific research problems.”
The company said that the o 3-mini model advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve.
OpenAI is making a smaller, more efficient version of its cleverest artificial intelligence model available for free as it seeks to answer the hype and enthusiasm swirling around a new open source offering from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.
