CEO Sam Altman announced that OpenAI will release its o3-mini model in around two weeks following external testing by safety researchers.

“We have now finalized a version and are beginning the release process; planning to ship in ~a couple of weeks,” Altman said.

A more compact and economical variant of the o3 model, the o3-mini was initially unveiled in December 2024.

The o3 model showed advanced reasoning skills, performing exceptionally well in domains like mathematics, coding, and scientific problem-solving.

On the ARC-AGI benchmark, both of the o3 models outperformed humans and reached state-of-the-art performance, approaching 90 percent.

The o3-mini model will be simultaneously released by OpenAI on its ChatGPT and API platforms.

Altman also hinted at future developments, saying, “I would love for us to be able to merge the GPT series and the o series in 2025.” This suggests the potential integration of OpenAI’s different model families in the future.

Compared to its larger counterpart, the o3-mini model is more economical and resource-efficient while still providing sophisticated AI capabilities. With its several reasoning effort modes and customizable "thinking time," customers can tailor performance to meet their own requirements.

A reference implementation for creating and coordinating agentic patterns with the Realtime API was also released by OpenAI. In less than 20 minutes, developers can use this repository to prototype a voice application with multi-agent flows.

“With the new UI, you can tell ChatGPT the traits you want it to have, how you want it to talk to you, and any rules you want it to follow,” the company said.

OpenAI said earlier this week that it would be launching a beta functionality called Tasks to ChatGPT, marking its entry into the virtual assistant market and putting it in competition with Alexa from Amazon and Siri from Apple.

An upsurge of investments in AI companies was triggered by the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, and OpenAI was able to clinch a $6.6 billion fundraising round in October thanks to its increasing popularity and new product launches.