OpenAI released o3-mini and then updated it to show more of its reasoning
OpenAI's o3-mini reached ChatGPT (including free users, their first taste of a reasoning model) and the API on 2025-01-31, 11 days after R1 but on a schedule set earlier.
- Date
- 31 January 2025
- Who
- OpenAI
- People
- Sam Altman, Kevin Weil
- Confidence
- High
- Deep dive
- Reasoning II, from o1 and o3 to DeepSeek-R1 and the labs that replicated them
Tier: Supporting · Significance: 3/5 · Org(s): OpenAI · People: Sam Altman, Kevin Weil · Confidence: High OpenAI's o3-mini reached ChatGPT (including free users, their first taste of a reasoning model) and the API on 2025-01-31, 11 days after R1 but on a schedule set earlier. At the 2024-12-20 o3 livestream Altman said the plan was to launch o3-mini toward the end of January and follow with o3 (TechCrunch, 2024-12-20). It is therefore OpenAI's own successor to o1-mini and not a replication of R1. I infer that the R1-linked changes are Altman's remark that releases would be pulled forward and the visible-reasoning update below. It shipped with three selectable reasoning-effort settings (low, medium, high), a "Reason" button for free users, and API prices of $4.40 per million output tokens and $0.55 per million cached input tokens, against $2.19 for R1's output (TechCrunch, 2025-01-31). The same day, in a Reddit Q&A, Sam Altman said OpenAI had been "on the wrong side of history" on open weights and needed a different open-source strategy, and product chief Kevin Weil said more of the model's thinking would be shown "very very soon" while acknowledging competitive-distillation concerns (TechCrunch). On 2025-02-06 OpenAI updated o3-mini's displayed chain of thought, but it remained a processed summary, since a second model reviews the raw thinking, removes unsafe content and simplifies it (TechCrunch). The effort setting is the first appearance of the effort control covered in B08-06.