OpenAI’s o3-Mini Is a Leaner AI Model That Keeps Pace With DeepSeek

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.

WIRED previously reported that OpenAI was prepping the new model, called o3-mini, for release on January 31. The company’s researchers have been working overtime to get it ready for prime time, according to sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

o3-mini, which OpenAI teased in December, is a smaller version of the model that features the most advanced AI reasoning capabilities of any OpenAI offering to date. The model can break difficult problems into constituent parts in order to figure out how best to solve them.

“This powerful and fast model advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve,” the company said in a blog post announcing o3-mini’s availability.

OpenAI is making o3-mini available to all Plus, Team, and Pro users of ChatGPT. Users of the free version of ChatGPT will also be able to try o3-mini but won’t be able to send as many queries, the company says.

OpenAI has evidently been using PhD students to help train a new model for some time. Several weeks ago, the company began recruiting PhD computer science students at $100 per hour for a “research collaboration” that would “involve working on unreleased models,” according to an email viewed by WIRED.

OpenAI also appears to have been recruiting PhD students with expertise in other areas through a company called Mercor that it regularly uses to find staff for model training. 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.”

Source : Wired

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