On Friday, during Day 12 of its “12 days of OpenAI,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced its latest AI “reasoning” models, o3 and o3-mini, which construct upon the o1 models launched earlier this yr. The corporate isn’t releasing them yet but will make these models available for public safety testing and research access today.
The models use what OpenAI calls “private chain of thought,” where the model pauses to look at its internal dialog and plan ahead before responding, which you may call “simulated reasoning” (SR)—a type of AI that goes beyond basic large language models (LLMs).
The corporate named the model family “o3” as an alternative of “o2” to avoid potential trademark conflicts with British telecom provider O2, in accordance with The Information. During Friday’s livestream, Altman acknowledged his company’s naming foibles, saying, “Within the grand tradition of OpenAI being really, truly bad at names, it’ll be called o3.”
In accordance with OpenAI, the o3 model earned a record-breaking rating on the ARC-AGI benchmark, a visible reasoning benchmark that has gone unbeaten since its creation in 2019. In low-compute scenarios, o3 scored 75.7 percent, while in high-compute testing, it reached 87.5 percent—comparable to human performance at an 85 percent threshold.
OpenAI also reported that o3 scored 96.7 percent on the 2024 American Invitational Mathematics Exam, missing only one query. The model also reached 87.7 percent on GPQA Diamond, which accommodates graduate-level biology, physics, and chemistry questions. On the Frontier Math benchmark by EpochAI, o3 solved 25.2 percent of problems, while no other model has exceeded 2 percent.
