o3-mini
Compact reasoning-focused model in OpenAI’s o-series line aimed at strong STEM and coding performance with lower cost than full o3.
Provider
OpenAI
Model family
OpenAI o-series
Reasoning LLM
Cost tier
Mini
Status
Current
Why teams choose it
Broad capability envelope
Useful when the same stack must cover chat, multimodal inputs, tooling, or structured-output shapes without juggling many SKUs.
Long-context analysis
Helps teams summarize, compare, and extract insights from long documents without losing important nuance.
Coding and tools
Works well for code assistance, tool calling, and agent workflows where instructions must stay consistent across steps.
Cost-efficient routing
Useful as part of a routing stack where cheap models handle drafts and confirmations and this tier handles genuinely hard passages.
Tradeoffs to know
- Not always best for casual chat—mis-routing wastes tokens.
- Tool and multimodal parity may differ from GPT-4o.
When not to use this
- Not ideal for sprawling research or brittle multi-hop reasoning unless you constrain scope tightly.
- Avoid for regulated or high-stakes outputs without evaluations that mimic your tooling, data, and review process.
- Promote traffic to heavier tiers inside the family when workflows need richer tools and longer horizons.
Technical specs
- Inputs
- text
- Outputs
- text
- Capabilities
- reasoning, coding, math
- License
- See vendor
- Model string
o3-mini
Benchmarks
No benchmark data yet.
OpenAI o-series family lineup
Previous versions
Compare with
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GPT-5.4 mini
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