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OpenAI's GPT-o3 Reasoning Model Is Ready for Prime Time

This is the second family of models OpenAI has dropped this week after the launch of GPT-4.1.

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Imad was a senior reporter covering Google and internet culture. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Tom's Guide and Wired, among others.
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Jon covers artificial intelligence. He previously led CNET's home energy and utilities category, with a focus on energy-saving advice, thermostats, and heating and cooling. Jon has more than a decade of experience writing and reporting, including as a statehouse reporter in Columbus, Ohio, a crime reporter in Birmingham, Alabama, and as a mortgage and housing market editor for Time's former personal finance brand, NextAdvisor. When he's not asking people questions, he can usually be found half asleep trying to read a long history book while surrounded by multiple cats. You can reach him at joreed@cnet.com
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3 min read
ChatGPT logo on smartphone in front of OpenAI screen

You can try out the new models now.

 Photo Illustration by Algi Febri Sugita/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

OpenAI o3, the developer's most advanced generative AI reasoning model yet, is here. This new family of models promises strong performance in coding, math, science and visual understanding, the company announced Wednesday. 

The new model is available for paying ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Team users. Those who use the free version can also try out the new reasoning capability by selecting "Think" from the drop down menu before entering a prompt. Education and Enterprise users will have access in one week. You'll still have your usual rate limits when you use the new model.

AI Atlas

OpenAI touts o3 as a smart AI model with the ability to reason, which means that it can recursively check its answers before giving you a final output. According to OpenAI, the model can also independently use all of ChatGPTs' tools, including web browsing, Python, image understanding and image generation. OpenAI says this helps solve complex multi-step problems.

Along with o3, OpenAI also announced o4-mini, a faster and cheaper reasoning model that can take on math, coding and visual tasks. Another model, o4-mini-high, is meant for more complex tasks that require more reasoning time. OpenAI says these models will replace older models, including o1, o3-mini and o3-mini-high.

What can the new OpenAI models do?

OpenAI says both o3 and o4-mini can "think with images," which is marketing lingo that really means that the model can understand the images you upload to the chat. The new models should be able to "see" and incorporate the images into their reasoning chain. OpenAI can train on the information you share unless you opt out, so make sure you aren't uploading sensitive or personal information.

For example, if you're asking ChatGPT o3 a chemistry question, you should be able to upload formulas scribbled on a whiteboard for the AI to use in its answer. CNET hasn't tested this out yet, but the ability does seem in line with the company's native image generator's ability to create legible, semi-accurate text in AI images. You can also crop and rotate the images, which is a new image editing ability in ChatGPT.

For programmers and others who work with code, OpenAI is releasing an AI agent that runs locally on a user's terminal. Called Codex CLI, it's a lightweight and open-source agent that can take advantage of o3 and o4-mini, with GPT-4.1 support coming later. For those who want even more computing power, OpenAI is expected to release o3-pro in a few weeks. Until then, Pro users can still access the existing o1-pro model. 

OpenAI also said it completely redid the safety training data for these models, including adding refusal prompts regarding biological threats, malware generation and jailbreaks. 

Watch this: Meta AI vs. ChatGPT: AI Chatbots Compared

What's next for OpenAI?

With Google and OpenAI having been trading blows for dominance in the AI space, OpenAI has been on a hot streak with releasing new feautres. On Monday, the company launched GPT-4.1, a new family of generative AI models with a 1 million token context window, which is essentially the amount of information the model can process. While it's a major improvement over 4.0, Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro has a larger, 2 million token context window. Not to be outdone, OpenAI introduced an update that greatly improved the memory of ChatGPT earlier this month. 

Despite Google's continued efforts to take the AI crown, ChatGPT is still the default AI system for most people. ChatGPT is currently the leader in AI with a 60% market share with 400 million weekly users, according to software firm Neontri. Even though Google dominates the online search industry, Gemini only has a 13.5% market share of the AI market. According to Statista, the AI market is expected to be worth $1.01 trillion by 2031, and companies that claim dominance early have the biggest chance of taking the largest part of that share.

OpenAI is also eyeing new ways to source data, and compete in another arena with tech billionaires and AI enthusiasts Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The AI company is considering building its own social media feed, The Verge reported this week. Meta and X (formerly Twitter) are both able to use its troves of user data to train their AI models. 

As OpenAI continues to build more advanced models like o3 and o4-mini, it will need an increasingly large, steady stream of human-generated content to refine the models' outputs. A new social media platform could be one way for the company to find that data.