Advanced Reasoning Models from OpenAI: o3 and o4-mini Unveiled
OpenAI, a leading research organisation in artificial intelligence (AI), has unveiled two new models, o3 and o4-mini, each with distinct capabilities that bring us closer to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Capabilities
The o3 model is recognised as OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model to date, excelling in logical problem-solving, coding, and numerical reasoning tasks. Optimised for high-quality reasoning performance, it may not offer the fastest response times compared to the o4-mini. However, it is best suited for complex reasoning, advanced coding tasks, and scenarios requiring precision over speed. The o3 model is less focused on multimodal processing, primarily optimised for text and reasoning.
On the other hand, the o4-mini model emphasises efficiency and speed, boasting about 40% lower latency compared to GPT-4o. It supports a very large context window of up to 200,000 tokens, enabling it to handle extensive documents or conversations efficiently. The o4-mini model also has multimodal capabilities, including image processing, making it suitable for routine automation involving text and images, such as customer support and email classification.
A specialized o4-mini-high variant is currently under testing, extending to structured visual analysis (OCR, charts, tables) and code. This variant has already outperformed o3-pro in some programming benchmarks.
Applications in the Context of AGI
Both models contribute to AGI development by combining advanced reasoning with multimodal understanding and operational efficiency. The o3's advanced reasoning supports foundational AGI tasks requiring deep logical understanding and problem-solving across domains. The o4-mini's speed and multimodality facilitate scalable AI tools that integrate vision and language, critical for real-world AGI applications that demand processing diverse data types quickly and at scale.
Use cases include automated email generation, classification, and customer support (o4-mini); complex code generation, document analysis, and semantic understanding of structured data (o4-mini-high); and advanced reasoning tasks requiring precision, such as scientific analysis or complex decision-making (o3).
Trade-offs and Future Outlook
The o3 model trades off speed for reasoning fidelity, while the o4-mini balances speed, cost-efficiency, and multimodal capabilities but with slightly reduced precision. Both models reflect incremental steps towards AGI by integrating multimodal inputs, large context handling, and improved reasoning.
OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5 intends to unify the strengths of these series, including the reasoning power of o3 and the multimodal efficiency of o4-mini, signalling a path to more generalized AI systems combining these capabilities seamlessly.
Availability and Usage
Both o3 and o4-mini models are accessible through OpenAI's ChatGPT platform and API services. Developers can integrate the models into their applications via OpenAI's Chat Completions API and Responses API. Enterprise and Education users will gain access to the models within a week. Free-tier users can experience o4-mini by selecting the 'Think' option before submitting their queries.
[1] Sabreena, a GenAI enthusiast and tech editor, highlights the latest advancements in AI and Data Science as the Manager of Content & Growth at our website.
[2] As AI continues to evolve, such innovative models will pave the way for more sophisticated and versatile applications, bringing us closer to achieving AGI.
[3] Both o3 and o4-mini share the same agentic and autonomous capabilities, showcasing how advanced AI has become.
[4] o3 offers peak performance for the most demanding tasks, while o4-mini provides a compelling blend of capability, speed, and cost-efficiency.
[5] o4-mini set a new benchmark in AIME 2025 (Mathematics) by scoring 99.5% when equipped with a Python interpreter.
[6] o4-mini significantly outperformed its predecessor, o3-mini, on the Humanity's Last Exam benchmark.
[7] Users subscribed to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team plans can utilise o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high models directly on the chat interface.
[8] The enhanced reasoning, tool use, and visual capabilities of o3 and o4-mini unlock a wide range of potential applications, including complex data analysis, advanced scientific research, sophisticated coding, education & tutoring, multimodal content creation, business intelligence & strategy, and creative problem solving.
[9] The o4-mini model showed its thought process while solving the equation, making it credible.
[10] o3, without any tools, demonstrated advanced scientific reasoning by achieving an accuracy of 87.7% on the GPQA Diamond (PhD-Level Science) benchmark.
[11] The o4-mini model took approximately 10 seconds to solve the given equation.
[12] The equation "14 + 39 - (√256 ÷ 3) + (5 × 4) - 6 = 58′′" requires the numbers 3 and 14 to be interchanged to make it correct.
[13] The o4-mini model, when analysing an image, read 3 out of the 4 accent colours mentioned but ended up reading them wrong.
The o3 model, in the realm of data science, showcases advanced reasoning capabilities, excelling in complex problem-solving, coding, and numerical reasoning tasks, making it suitable for scientific analysis or complex decision-making. On the other hand, the o4-mini model leverages technology and artificial intelligence, offering efficiency and speed, with multimodal capabilities that include image processing, making it beneficial for applications like automated customer support, email classification, and routine automation involving text and images.
