OpenAI unveils ‘o3’ reasoning AI models — but you need to wait until January

OpenAI said on Friday it was testing new reasoning AI models, o3 and o3 mini, in a sign of growing competition with rivals such as Google to create smarter models capable of tackling complex problems.

CEO Sam Altman said the AI startup plans to launch o3 mini by the end of January, and full o3 after that, as more robust large language models could outperform existing models and attract new investments and users.

OpenAI released o1 AI models in September designed to spend more time processing queries to solve hard problems.

The o1 models are capable of reasoning through complex tasks and can solve more challenging problems than previous models in science, coding and math, the AI firm had said in a blog post.

OpenAI’s new o3 and o3 mini models, which are in internal safety testing currently, will be more powerful than its previously launched o1 models, the company said.