SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) -- OpenAI on Friday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) "reasoning" model o3-mini.
The company said the newest in the company's o family of reasoning models is both "powerful" and "affordable."
"Today's launch marks ... an important step toward broadening accessibility to advanced AI in service of our mission," an OpenAI spokesperson said.
OpenAI first previewed the model in December alongside a more capable system o3.
Model O3-mini is fine-tuned for STEM problems, specifically for programming, math, and science. The model is largely on par with the o1 family, o1 and o1-mini in terms of capabilities, but runs faster and costs less, according to OpenAI.
The company claimed that o3-mini made 39 percent fewer "major mistakes" on "tough real-world questions" in A/B tests versus o1-mini, with "clearer" and "faster" responses.
Starting Friday, o3-mini will be available to all users via ChatGPT, and available via OpenAI's API to select developers, but it initially will not have support for analyzing images.
"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 a blog post on Friday. "The release of o3-mini marks another step in OpenAI's mission to push the boundaries of cost-effective intelligence."
According to a report by TechCrunch, o3-mini is not OpenAI's most powerful model to date, nor does it leapfrog DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model in every benchmark.
