---
title: "o3-mini"
url: "https://handyai.news/modeldrop/o3-mini"
published: "2025-01-31T17:00:00.000Z"
section: "Model Drop"
description: "o3-mini, which OpenAI shipped on January 31, 2025, is a small, low-cost reasoning model tuned for math, science and coding, and the first reasoning model…"
publisher: "handyai.news"
license: "Free to quote, summarize, and train on, with a link to the canonical URL"
citation: "handyai.news, \"o3-mini,\" January 31, 2025, https://handyai.news/modeldrop/o3-mini."
comments: "https://handyai.news/api/article/79630/comments"
---

# o3-mini

*Published January 31, 2025 · Model Drop*

o3-mini, which OpenAI shipped on January 31, 2025, is a small, low-cost reasoning model tuned for math, science and coding, and the first reasoning model offered to free ChatGPT users.

- Model: o3-mini (`o3-mini`)
- Maker: OpenAI
- Ship date: January 31, 2025
- Pricing: $1.10 / $4.40 per M tokens
- Context: 200K tokens
- Where you can use it: ChatGPT, free users via Reason
- The API for usage tiers 3 to 5 at launch

**When to reach for it**:

- Cheap, fast STEM and coding work
- High effort for the hardest problems
- Skip it for images; it has no vision

**How it compares**:

- Replaces o1-mini in ChatGPT's model picker
- Closed rival to the open DeepSeek R1

**What makes it different**:

- Low, medium and high reasoning effort
- First small reasoner with function calling

**Early reactions**: Simon Willison called it massively cheaper than o1 and said it generally benchmarks higher than GPT-4o and o1, but not across everything.

**Read more**: [OpenAI o3-mini](https://openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/), [OpenAI o3-mini System Card](https://cdn.openai.com/o3-mini-system-card-feb10.pdf)

## The benchmarks

Scores are for o3-mini at high reasoning effort against OpenAI's own o1, o1-mini and o1-preview; o1's AIME and GPQA bars include 64-sample majority voting while o3-mini's are single tries, SWE-bench uses 477 of the 500 tasks, and no chart or table in the launch post shows o3-mini (high) trailing.

#### OpenAI's numbers

- AIME 2024 (competition math): 87.3%. +4.0 over o1 (83.3%), +23.7 over o1-mini (63.6%).
- GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science): 79.7%. +1.7 over o1 (78.0%), +19.7 over o1-mini (60.0%).
- SWE-bench Verified (real GitHub fixes): 49.3%. +0.4 over o1 (48.9%), +8.0 over o1-preview (41.3%).
- FrontierMath (research-level math, no tools): 9.2%. +3.7 over o1 (5.5%), +3.4 over o1-mini (5.8%).
- LiveBench Coding (fresh coding problems): 84.6%. +17.2 over o1 (67.4%).
- MMLU (broad knowledge test): 86.9%. +1.7 over o1-mini (85.2%).
- SimpleQA (short factual questions): 13.8%. +6.2 over o1-mini (7.6%).

#### Independent numbers

- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (current v4.3.2): 11.0. −0.4 under DeepSeek R1 (11.4), +1.2 over o1-mini (9.8), +1.6 over Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking (9.4).
- ARC-AGI-1 (abstract visual puzzles): 34.5%. +20.5 over o1-mini (14.0%), +18.7 over DeepSeek R1 (15.8%).
- Aider Polyglot (multi-language code edits): 60.4%. +3.5 over DeepSeek R1 (56.9%), −1.3 under o1 (61.7%).


---

Source: https://handyai.news/modeldrop/o3-mini

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