OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day “shipmas” event, TechCrunch reported.
On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 “reasoning” model it released earlier in the year. O3 is a model family, to be more precise — as was the case with o1. There’s o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, distilled model fine-tuned for particular tasks.
OpenAI makes the remarkable claim that o3, at least in certain conditions, approached AGI — with significant caveats.
Why call the new model o3, not o2? Well, trademarks may be to blame. According to The Information, OpenAI skipped o2 to avoid a potential conflict with British telecom provider O2. Sam Altman somewhat confirmed this during a livestream this morning.
Neither o3 nor o3-mini are widely available yet, but safety researchers can sign up for a preview for o3-mini starting today. An o3 preview will arrive sometime after; OpenAI didn’t specify when. Altman said that the plan is to launch o3-mini toward the end of January.
NBC News reported: OpenAI’s “12 days of Shipmas” which wrapped up on Friday, brought a sense of levity to end the year. The marketing blitz served as a way for the high-profile and controversial AI startup to show it can release an extensive roster of new features and tools while also having fun.
But when the calendar turns, the company faces some serious challenges. Most notably, there’s co-founder Elon Musk, who now runs rival startup xAI, and is in the midst of a heated legal battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that could have a big impact on the company’s future.
The threat Musk poses to OpenAI is even more significant considering the hefty amount of influence the world’s richest person is poised to assume as part of the incoming Trump administration.
The pressure on OpenAI is tied in large part to its $157 billion valuation, achieved in the two years since the company launched its viral chatbot, ChatGPT, and kicked off the boom in generative AI.
ArsTechnica reported: Sam Altman announced its latest AI “reasoning” models, o3 and o3-mini, which build upon the o1 models launched earlier this year. The company is not releasing them yet but will make this 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 examine its internal dialogue and plan ahead before responding, which you might call “simulated reasoning” (SR) – a form of AI that goes beyond basic large language models (LLMs).
The o3-mini variant, also announced Friday, includes an adaptive thinking time feature, offering low, medium, and high processing speeds. The company states that higher compute settings produce better results. OpenAI reports that o3-mini outperforms its predecessor, o1, on the Codeforces benchmark.
In my opinion, it sounds like OpenAI o3 and o3-mini are likely to become the next generation of AI models.