- OpenAI’s new reasoning model, o3-mini, will launch soon
- Sam Altman has now confirmed that it will be available to free tier users
- ChatGPT Plus users will benefit from “tons of o3-mini usage”
OpenAI announced the upcoming rollout of its incredibly intelligent new reasoning model earlier this week, and now we have even better news: o3-mini will be available for free.
Sam Altman confirmed the news on X yesterday, saying “Big news: ChatGPT free tier is getting o3-mini!” The OpenAI CEO also confirmed that Plus members, those paying $20/£20/AU$30 per month will get “tons of o3-mini usage”, which is ideal for those who want to take advantage fully of the new model.
o3 and o3-mini were revealed in December as part of OpenAI’s 12 Days of OpenAI event, which also saw the official US release of Sora, the AI video generation tool from OpenAI.
o3-mini is a substantial upgrade to the o1-mini reasoning model released last year, allowing users to obtain answers to complex scientific and mathematical problems. There’s no exact timeline for when o3-mini will be available, but Altman confirmed on January 17 that it will launch in the API and ChatGPT in “a few weeks.”
Once o3-mini is available (for Free, Plus and Pro users), you will be able to get help with questions that require thinking and reasoning. In the new model, you’ll even be able to adjust the thinking time to give the AI model more time to come up with an answer. There will be a “low calculation” option for quick answers and a “high calculation” option for tasks that require extra thinking power.
big news: the free tier of chatgpt will get o3-mini! (and the plus tier will benefit from tons of use of o3-mini)January 23, 2025
o3-mini is free for everyone
When OpenAI announced the new model in December, my first thought was “how long will we have to wait to try it for free?” » Fortunately, Altman and co have a nice surprise in store for free users to kick off 2025 by announcing that o3-mini will indeed be free.
We don’t have more information on how many prompts you’ll be able to request for free from o3-mini, but hopefully there will be a decent amount of free usage so everyone can enjoy the future of AI reasoning models.
o3-mini hits the sweet spot between a reasoning model and a more general usage model, and OpenAI hopes this new compromise will break into the mainstream and become an everyday tool for the average consumer. As soon as we have access to o3-mini, we’ll put it through its paces, so stay tuned to TechRadar for all the next ChatGPT o3-mini news.
