OpenAI's O3: Features, O1 Comparison, Benchmarks

OpenAI’s O3: Features, O1 Comparison, Benchmarks & More | DataCamp Skip to main content Group Training more people?

 Get your team access to the full DataCamp for business platform. OpenAI just released the long-awaited o3 model . Originally teased during the company’s 12-day Christmas event in December 2024, o3 and o3-mini were positioned as a major leap forward—so much so that OpenAI skipped “o2” entirely, citing potential brand confusion with Telefonica’s O2, but likely also to signal a substantial leap forward over OpenAI o1. 

 After months of back and forth—including a brief detour where o3 was said to be folded into GPT-5 —OpenAI has made o3 its new flagship model. It now surpasses o1 across nearly every benchmark, with full tool access in ChatGPT and via API. 

 Read on to learn more about o3 and o3-mini. If you also want to read about the newest model, o4-mini, check out this introductory guide on o4-mini . 

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 Start Now What Is OpenAI o3?

 o3 is OpenAI’s latest frontier model, designed to advance reasoning capabilities across a range of complex tasks like coding, math, science, and visual perception. 

 The o3 reasoning model is the first reasoning model wit h access to autonomous tool use . This means that o3 can use search, Python, image generation, and interpretation to achieve its tasks. 

 This has translated into strong performance on advanced benchmarks that test real-world problem-solving, where previous models have struggled. OpenAI highlights o3’s improvement over o1, positioning it as their most capable and versatile model yet. 

 O1 vs. O3

 o3 builds directly on the foundation set by o1, but the improvements are significant across key areas. OpenAI has positioned o3 as a model designed to handle more complex reasoning tasks, with performance gains reflected in its benchmarks. 

 Coding

 When tested on software engineering tasks, o3 achieved 69.1% accuracy on the SWE-Bench Verified Software Engineering benchmark, a substantial improvement over o1’s score of 48.9%. 

 

 Source: OpenAI 

 Similarly, in competitive programming, o3 reached an ELO score of 2706, far surpassing o1’s previous high of 1891. Moreover, o3 performs significantly better at code editing benchmarks, with o3 variants outperforming o1 across the board on the Aider Polyglot Code Editing benchmark. 

 

 Source: OpenAI 

 Math and science

 The improvements aren’t limited to coding. o3 also excels in mathematical reasoning, scoring 91.6% accuracy on the AIME 2024, compared to o1’s 74.3%. It also scored an 88.9% on the AIME 2025. These gains suggest a model that can handle more nuanced and difficult problems, moving closer to benchmarks traditionally dominated by human experts. 

 

 Source: OpenAI 

 The leap is similarly apparent in science-related benchmarks. On GPQA Diamond, which measures performance on PhD-level science questions, o3 achieved an accuracy of 83.3%, up from o1’s 78%. The

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