Question 1

What is OpenAI o3-mini?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI o3-mini is a large language model from OpenAI, released on 31 January 2025. Reasoning quality at fast-tier prices — the practical o-series default.

Question 2

When was OpenAI o3-mini released?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI o3-mini was released by OpenAI on 31 January 2025.

Question 3

How much does OpenAI o3-mini cost?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI o3-mini costs $1.10 per 1 million input tokens and $4.40 per 1 million output tokens via OpenAI’s API. At a typical 3:1 input/output ratio the blended cost works out to about $1.93 per 1M tokens.

Question 4

How smart is OpenAI o3-mini?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI o3-mini scores 70 out of 100 on our intelligence index — a strong production-tier composite of MMLU, MMLU Pro, GPQA, MATH and HumanEval benchmark scores. That places it #10 of 22 language models we track.

Question 5

What is the context window of OpenAI o3-mini?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI o3-mini has a 200k-token context window — roughly 150,000 words of text. That’s what you can fit into a single request (your prompt plus all uploaded documents and the model’s response combined).

Question 6

What is OpenAI o3-mini best for?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI o3-mini is most useful for coding agents, stem tutoring and step-by-step problem solving. Its key strengths are affordable reasoning, tool use and reliable on math/code.

Question 7

How fast is OpenAI o3-mini?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI o3-mini generates around 60 output tokens per second with a typical time-to-first-token of 6.5 seconds on the major API providers. Reasoning models that "think" before answering will appear slower on tokens-per-second since they spend time on internal chain-of-thought.

Question 8

Is OpenAI o3-mini better than GPT-5.5?

Accepted Answer

GPT-5.5 scores higher on our intelligence index (82 vs 70), so on the hardest tasks GPT-5.5 typically wins. OpenAI o3-mini can still be the better pick on price, latency or specific capabilities. See our full OpenAI o3-mini vs GPT-5.5 comparison at /ai-models/compare/gpt-5-5-vs-o3-mini/.

Question 9

What is the best alternative to OpenAI o3-mini?

Accepted Answer

The closest alternatives to OpenAI o3-mini are GPT-5.5, OpenAI o1 and Claude 4 Opus. Each shares most of OpenAI o3-mini’s use-cases — pick by price, context window or specific capability rather than headline intelligence.

Question 10

Is OpenAI o3-mini open source?

Accepted Answer

No. OpenAI o3-mini is proprietary — the weights are not released. Access is via OpenAI’s own API and partner platforms. For open-weights alternatives in the same tier, see our open-source AI models page.

Question 11

Can I use OpenAI o3-mini for free?

Accepted Answer

The consumer ChatGPT product offers free, rate-limited access to a version of OpenAI o3-mini and DALL·E 3. The OpenAI API itself is paid — though new accounts get a small starting credit. Microsoft Copilot also bundles GPT access at no extra cost on some tiers.

OpenAI o3-mini

At a glance

Benchmark scores

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