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OpenAI today announced an improved version of its most capable AI model yet, one that requires even more time to deliberate on questions, just a day after Google announced its first such model.
OpenAI’s new model, called o3, replaces the o1, which the company introduced in September. Like o1, the new model spends time thinking about a problem to provide better answers to questions that require step-by-step logical reasoning. (OpenAI decided to leave out the “o2” moniker because it is already the name of a mobile operator in the UK.)
“We view this as the beginning of the next phase of AI,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a livestream on Friday. “Where you can use these models to perform increasingly complex tasks that require a lot of reasoning.”
The o3 model scores much higher on several measures than its predecessor, OpenAI says, including those that measure complex coding-related skills and advanced competencies in math and science. It is three times better than o1 at answering questions posed by ARC-AGIa benchmark designed to test the ability of AI models to reason about extremely difficult mathematical and logical problems they encounter for the first time.
Google is pursuing a similar line of research. Noam Shazeer, Google researcher, yesterday revealed in a post on X that the company has developed its own reasoning model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Google CEO Sundar Pichai called it “our most thoughtful model yet” in his own publication. Google’s new model achieved a high score in SWE-Bench, a test that measures the agentic capabilities of models.
However, OpenAI’s new o3 model is 20 percent better than o1. “O3 blew it out of the water,” he says About the presspostdoctoral researcher at Princeton University who helped develop SWE-Bench. “A very surprising increase, I’m not sure how they did it.”
The two dueling models show that the competition between OpenAI and Google is fiercer than ever. It is crucial for OpenAI to demonstrate that it can continue to make progress as it seeks to attract more investment and build a profitable business. Meanwhile, Google is desperate to demonstrate that it remains at the forefront of AI research.
The new models also show how AI companies are increasingly looking beyond simply extending AI models to extract greater intelligence from them.
