Meet o3 & o4‐mini: Decoding OpenAI’s Latest Model Release

OpenAI announced more new models toady. While, new model is always exciting but this releases I thin needs to be broken down a little bit. o3 has launched and will now replace o1. There is now no o3-mini and now we just get o4-mini and o4-mini-high. At the time of writing I haven't been able to find what are the limits to use.

o3 at a glance

• Launch & availability – Debuted today and immediately replaced o1 in the ChatGPT picker for Plus, Pro, and Team tiers; it’s also live in the Chat Completions and Responses APIs.

• Top‑tier reasoning – Sets new state‑of‑the‑art scores on Codeforces, SWE‑bench, MMMU, and more; external reviewers logged 20 % fewer major errors than o1 on real‑world tasks. OpenAI

• Multimodal “think with images.” Users can drop in screenshots, sketches, or charts; the model integrates, zooms, and rotates images inside its chain‑of‑thought. 

• Full agentic tool use – o3 can autonomously decide when to call web search, Python, file analysis, or image generation to answer complex queries in under a minute.

⚡ o4‑mini at a glance

• Launch & availability – Released the same day; appears beside o3 in Plus/Pro/Team, and free users can sample it by choosing “Think.” API access mirrors o3.

• Use‑case match: Reach for o3 when you need maximum accuracy on thorny, multi‑step tasks; default to o4‑minifor day‑to‑day coding, math, and visual Q&A at scale.

• Roadmap hint: OpenAI signaled that an “o3‑pro” (even more compute‑hungry) will follow, while both o3 and o4‑mini may be the last standalone reasoning models before a unified GPT‑5.

We’ve unpacked today’s big moves—o3 stepping in for o1, and the debut of o4‑mini (plus o4‑mini‑high). Whether you need rock‑solid multi‑step reasoning or a speedy buddy for day‑to‑day coding and visual Q&A, you know which model to pick.

Your turn: fire up both in your next project and let me know which one surprises you most. Hit reply with your experiments or questions, and I’ll feature the best use‑cases in next week’s issue.

Until then, happy prompting!