OpenAI today announced an improved version of its most powerful AI model yet – one that takes even longer to think about questions – just a day after Google announced the first model of its kind.
The novel OpenAI model, called o3, replaces o1, introduced by the company in September. Like o1, the novel model takes time to think through a problem in order to provide better answers to questions that require step-by-step logical reasoning. (OpenAI has chosen to omit the “o2” moniker because it is already the name of a mobile operator in the UK.)
“We see this as the beginning of the next phase of artificial intelligence,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during a live broadcast on Friday. “Where you can use these models to perform increasingly complex, reasoning-intensive tasks.”
OpenAI claims that the o3 model performs significantly better on several measures than its predecessor, including those measuring convoluted coding skills and advanced math and science competencies. He is three times better than o1 at answering questions asked by ARC-AGIa benchmark designed to test the ability of AI models to reason about extremely hard mathematical and logical problems they encounter for the first time.
Google is pursuing a similar line of research. Yesterday Noam Shazeer, Google researcher 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 his “most thoughtful model yet.” own post. Google’s novel model achieved a high score in SWE-Bench, a test that measures the abilities of modeling agents.
However, OpenAI’s novel o3 model is 20 percent better than o1. “O3 blew it up,” 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.”
Both matchup 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 show that it remains at the forefront of artificial intelligence research.
The novel models also show that AI companies are increasingly moving beyond simply scaling AI models to extract greater intelligence from them.