OpenAI releases o3-mini

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OpenAI o3-mini released — a cost-efficient small model in the reasoning series, with low, medium and high reasoning effort options

Why it matters

Previewed in December 2024, it launched the same day in ChatGPT Plus, Team and Pro and in the API for usage tiers 3–5, and free users could try it through the 'Reason' button — the first reasoning model offered to free ChatGPT users. OpenAI cited particular strength in science, math and coding

Source — Primary sources first; secondary reports are labelled “Press”

Officialopenai.comhttps://openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/

Added in Week 41, 2026 · See that week

On the map — ⑥ Reasoning Models line

  1. Previous stopDeepSeek-R1
  2. This recordo3-mini
  3. Next stopGPT-4.5
See it on the map

In the model family tree — GPT family · 23 versions

  1. Earlier versiono1-preview / o1-mini
  2. This recordo3-mini
  3. Later versiono3 / o4-mini
See the whole GPT family

Related notes — Notes on the same axis from the same week

A report that used numbers obtained by asking models as evidence

Same week

AI Act Chapters 1 and 2 (prohibited practices, AI literacy) begin to applyPressAndrej Karpathy coins "vibe coding" on XPressMuennighoff et al. present s1PaperMistral AI releases Mistral Small 3Official

Nearby on the same axis

Nvidia loses about $589 billion, the biggest single-stock drop in US historyPressCAIS and Scale AI release Humanity's Last Exam (3,000-question public release)OfficialDeepSeek-R1PaperFrançois Chollet leaves Google and founds Ndea, a lab dedicated to AGIOfficial