OpenAI Upgrades Its Smartest AI Model With Improved Reasoning Skills

OpenAI today announced an improved version of its most capable artificial intelligence model to date—one that takes even more time to deliberate over questions—just a day after Google announced its first model of this type.

OpenAI’s new model, called o3, replaces o1, which the company introduced in September. Like o1, the new model spends time ruminating over a problem in order to deliver better answers to questions that require step-by-step logical reasoning. (OpenAI chose to skip the “o2” moniker because it’s already the name of a mobile carrier in the UK.)

“We view this as the beginning of the next phase of AI,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a livestream Friday. “Where you can use these models to do increasingly complex tasks that require a lot of reasoning.”

The o3 model scores much higher on several measures than its predecessor, OpenAI says, including ones that measure complex coding-related skills and advanced math and science competency. It is three times better than o1 at answering questions posed by ARC-AGI, a benchmark designed to test an AI models’ ability to reason over extremely difficult mathematical and logic problems they’re encountering for the first time.

Google is pursuing a similar line of research. Noam Shazeer, a 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’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, called it “our most thoughtful model yet” in his own post. Google’s new model achieved a high score on SWE-Bench, a test that measures a models’ agentic abilities.

However, OpenAI’s new o3 model is 20 percent better than o1. “o3 blew it out of the water,” says Ofir Press, a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University who helped develop SWE-Bench. “Very surprising increase, not sure how they did it.”

The two dueling models show competition between OpenAI and Google to be fiercer than ever. It is crucial for OpenAI to demonstrate that it can keep making advances as it seeks to attract more investment and build a profitable business. Google is meanwhile desperate to show that it remains at the forefront of AI research.

The new models also show how AI companies are increasingly looking beyond simply scaling up AI models in order to wring greater intelligence out of them.