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 ...