OpenAI’s o3-mini is here and available to all users

OpenAI’s latest machine learning mode has arrived. On Friday, the company released o3-mini and it’s available to try now. For the first time, OpenAI is making one of its “reasoning” models available to free users of ChatGPT, though a message limit applies.

When OpenAI first previewed o3 and o3-mini at the end of last year, CEO Sam Altman said the latter would arrive “around the end of January.” Altman gave a more concrete timeline on January 17 when he wrote on X that OpenAI was “planning to ship in a couple of weeks.”

Now that it’s here, it’s safe to say o3-mini arrives with a sense of urgency. On January 20, the same day Altman was attending Donald Trump’s inauguration, China’s DeepSeek quietly released its R1 chain-of-thought model. By January 27, the company’s chatbot surpassed ChatGPT as the most-download free app on the US App Store after going viral. The overnight success of DeepSeek wiped $1 trillion of stock market value, and almost certainly left OpenAI blindsided.

In the aftermath of last week, OpenAI said it was working with Microsoft to identify two accounts the company claims may have distilled its models. Distillation is the process of transferring the knowledge of an advanced AI system to a smaller, more efficient one. Distillation is not a controversial practice. DeepSeek has used distillation on its own R1 model to train its smaller algorithms; in fact, OpenAI’s terms of service allow for distillation as long users don’t train competing models on the outputs of the company’s AI.

OpenAI did not explicitly name DeepSeek. “We know [China]-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies,” an OpenAI spokesperson told The Guardian recently. However, David Sacks, President Trump’s AI advisor, was more direct, claiming there was “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek had “distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models.”

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