OpenAI o3 mini Officially Released: Making Reasoning Models Affordable at $0.15 per Million Tokens
OpenAI Launches o3 mini: Making Reasoning Models No Longer a Luxury
In May 2026, OpenAI officially released o3 mini, packaging the core capabilities of its flagship reasoning model o3 into a highly affordable version—$0.15/1M input tokens, 100x cheaper than o3's $15/1M.
Key Performance Data
o3 mini is not a "stripped-down" version of o3. It exceeds expectations in real-world scenarios:
| Benchmark | o3 mini | o3 (Flagship) | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|---|
| AIME 2024 | 63.4% | 96.7% | 13.4% |
| GPQA Diamond | 71.2% | 87.7% | 53.0% |
| SWE-bench | 49.3% | 71.7% | 38.0% |
o3 mini's mathematical reasoning ability is nearly 50 percentage points higher than GPT-4o, approaching professional competition level.
Three Adjustable "Reasoning Effort" Levels
o3 mini introduces the reasoning_effort parameter:
- low: Fastest, about 3-5 seconds, suitable for simple reasoning
- medium (default): About 8-15 seconds, balancing speed and depth
- high: About 30-60 seconds, approaching o3's reasoning quality
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI()
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="o3-mini",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Prove that √2 is irrational"}],
reasoning_effort="high"
)
Pricing Comparison (May 2026)
| Model | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| o3 mini | $0.15/1M | $0.60/1M |
| o3 | $15/1M | $60/1M |
| GPT-4o | $2.50/1M | $10/1M |
| GPT-4o mini | $0.15/1M | $0.60/1M |
Note: o3 mini is priced the same as GPT-4o mini but far surpasses it in mathematical and code reasoning capabilities.
When to Use o3 mini?
Suitable for: AI applications needing reasoning capabilities but with limited budgets, math problem-solving agents, code debugging and algorithm implementation, scientific data analysis.
Not suitable for: Everyday conversational text generation (GPT-4o mini is cheaper and sufficient), tasks requiring visual input (o3 mini does not support images).
Industry Impact
o3 mini means that "reasoning AI" finally has an affordable price. Previously, companies hesitated to adopt o3 due to cost; now, the same reasoning capabilities can be deployed at 1% of the cost.
Over the next three months, we expect a surge in AI applications for math tutoring, code review, and scientific research—scenarios that previously couldn't scale due to high reasoning model costs.
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