AI News Monitor

The AI tech giant’s latest release promises more advanced AI capabilities at little to no cost.

OpenAI has released its o3-mini model on ChatGPT and its API services. For the first time ever, OpenAIhas made it available to free users.

The new reasoning model is designed to match the performance of the OpenAI o1 series in math, coding, and science. It’s also expected to outperform them in speed.

“While OpenAI o1 remains our broader general knowledge reasoning model, OpenAI o3-mini provides a specialized alternative for technical domains requiring precision and speed,” says OpenAI.

The model supports features that have been requested by developers through user feedback, including function calling⁠, Structured Outputs⁠, and developer messages. Developers can integrate o3-mini into their own custom applications using OpenAI’s API services.

The new model does not support vision capabilities though, in which case developers would have to continue using the o1 series for visual reasoning tasks.

People who use the free version of ChatGPT will also be able to access o3-mini. OpenAI’s reasoning models had previously been restricted to paid ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users.

Interestingly, this new model has been rolled out for free only days after DeepSeek’s R1 was released open-source, shocking the tech sector. In that time, Chinese group Alibaba has released its Qwen2.5 as open-source. Moonshot released its Kimi k1.5, also open source. And Microsoft has canceled the subscription previously required to use o1 in Copilot, making the feature free for all users.

Analysts suggested, after DeepSeek-R1’s release, that the open-source model might radically change the idea of how much AI costs. DeepSeek and its founder Liang Wenfeng managed to create a low-cost, high-efficiency AI model that democratized access to AI with advanced reasoning capabilities. Before then, the industry looked set to be dominated by a few tech giants controlling access to costly, closed models. OpenAI’s recent release of its o3-mini reasoning model for free may be further signs of a chain reaction taking place. Many users across the globe certainly hope that is the case, and that innovation and efficiency in AI development may bring—or continue to bring—costs down.