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OpenAI Launches o3-mini And Deep Research Tool Amid New Partnerships And More
By TechDogs Bureau

Updated on Mon, Feb 3, 2025
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Leading businesses don’t achieve pole position without continuous updates to their products, and no one takes this more seriously than OpenAI—the undisputed leader of the AI era.
Sure, the company faced a recent threat in the form of DeepSeek, which claimed to have developed its own AI assistant capable of challenging OpenAI’s most powerful model. However, that threat soon died out as reports emerged that the model wasn’t what it claimed to be—in terms of cost, resource usage, or capabilities.
A recent report by NewsGuard found that DeepSeek’s chatbot was able to achieve only 17% accuracy in delivering news and information, where it repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave useless answers 53% of the time—resulting in an 83% fail rate.
Yet, despite the crazy ride of what DeepSeek is or is not capable of, OpenAI wasn’t thrown off its goal.
The company released its o3-mini model.
Previewed in December, OpenAI’s o3-mini is its newest, most cost-efficient model in its reasoning series that offers more advanced capabilities at cheaper rates. Available in both ChatGPT and the API, the new model’s early release is the company’s reply to DeepSeek’s R1 model.
The o3-mini reasoning model is also available in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
The new model delivers exceptional STEM capabilities, especially in science, math, and coding, while maintaining low costs and reduced latency. It also supports highly requested developer features including function calling, Structured Outputs, and developer messages, as well as streaming.
The new model offers three reasoning effort options—low, medium, and high—and is available to Plus, Team, and Pro users, while Enterprise users will be able to access the model later in February.
However, the most notable feature of this release is that it’s available to free plan users as well, who can try OpenAI o3-mini by selecting ‘Reason’ in the message composer or by regenerating a response. The release marks the first time a reasoning model has been made available to free users in ChatGPT.
Following this, OpenAI also introduced deep research.
This new capability offers users a new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks, accomplishing research tasks that would normally take humans hours in a few minutes. Once the research is completed, users will get a notification
“Deep research is OpenAI's next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst,” reads the release announcing the new capabilities.
The new feature is powered by an upcoming version of OpenAI’s o3 model—one that’s optimized for web browsing and data analysis. The capabilities span industries such as business, medical research, shopping, general knowledge, UX design, and more.
However, OpenAI did mention that Deep Research may show limitations in the form of hallucinated facts, incorrect inferences, and struggles with distinguishing authoritative information from rumors, as well as formatting errors in reports and citations—issues that OpenAI expects to resolve quickly.
Other than improvements to its own products, OpenAI has been at the center of headlines for spearheading numerous partnerships.
This includes the recent $500 billion Project Stargate, which is a collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX, with the inclusion of NVIDIA, Arm, and Microsoft—OpenAI’s primary backer.
This move also sprouted an addendum in the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership.
The project focuses on building data centers and other necessary infrastructure for OpenAI in the U.S. and would see SoftBank’s CEO be the Chairman.
Building on this project, OpenAI and SoftBank revealed another joint venture in Japan—SB OpenAI Japan—which will see the two bring AI services to corporate customers in the country.
The joint venture will be owned by OpenAI and will include SoftBank paying $3 billion annually to use OpenAI's technology across its group companies, in addition to the $15 billion infused into Project Stargate.
The two will also seek the participation of 500 businesses in the country to help build Japan’s AI network.
Other than this, OpenAI also partnered with U.S. National Laboratories, which will see it install its latest o-series models to supercharge National Labs’ scientific research using OpenAI’s latest reasoning models. This includes using the models for energy and national security applications on Los Alamos’s Venado supercomputer.
“As threats to the nation become more complex and more pressing, we need new approaches and advanced technologies to preserve America’s security,” said Laboratory Director Thom Mason. “Artificial intelligence models from OpenAI will allow us to do this more successfully, while also advancing our scientific missions to solve some of the nation’s most important challenges.”
The partnership will also bring OpenAI’s powerful models to the approximately 15,000 scientists working across a wide range of disciplines, enabling them to utilize it across scientific research, disease prevention, cybersecurity, power grid protection, energy infrastructure advancements, natural resource management, detection of biological and cyber threats, and more.
All of this came amid OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claiming the company has been “on the wrong side of history” and "needs to figure out a different open-source strategy”—statements made during an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit.
However, he went on to add, “Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority.”
Do you think OpenAI will be able to cement its position as the leader of the AI revolution with these moves? Do you think its competitors need to make similar moves?
Let us know in the comments below!
First published on Mon, Feb 3, 2025
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