We knew it was coming but OpenAI has made it official and released its o3-mini reasoning model to all users. The new model will be available on ChatGPT starting Friday, though your level of access will depend on your level of subscription.
OpenAI first teased the o3 model family on the finale of its 12 Days of OpenAI livestream event in December (less than two weeks after debuting its o1 reasoning model family). CEO Sam Altman shared additional details on the o3-mini model in mid-January and later announced that the model would be made available to all users as part of the ChatGPT platform. He appears to have delivered on that promise.
As of Friday, users at all subscription tiers can access the o3-mini model through the ChatGPT platform. Free users need to tap the “Reason” button in the prompt window to activate it, while paid subscribers can simply select it from the drop-down model selection menu.
As with most of OpenAI’s new features, free tier users will have limited access to the model, Plus and Teams subscribers get 150 queries per day, and Pro subscribers (paying $200 per month) receive unlimited access. Paid users will also have access to o3-mini-high, which grants the model additional compute resources at the expense of longer response times.
Enterprise and Edu subscribers will gain access next week. The model is also available through the company’s API starting Friday.
As with the larger o1 and o3 models, o3-mini is designed differently than conventional LLMs in that it will internally check its responses for accuracy and reproduceability before returning them to the user. This results in longer inference times but more accurate answers. o3-mini is specifically geared towards STEM tasks such as programming, math, and science. It offers similar performance to the o1 model family but at a significant power and cost savings.
“While o1 remains our broader general-knowledge reasoning model, o3-mini provides a specialized alternative for technical domains requiring precision and speed,” OpenAI wrote in its announcement post. “The release of o3-mini marks another step in OpenAI’s mission to push the boundaries of cost-effective intelligence.”