New Delhi, Feb. 1 -- After previewing the o3-Mini reasoning model during the 12-day ship-mas event in December, OpenAI is finally releasing the new model for free and paid users alike. The first-ever 'free' reasoning model from OpenAI comes as the company faces rising competition from China's DeepSeek whose R1 reasoning model has been freely available since its early January global debut.

OpenAI says its new o3-Mini model has been optimized for tasks like math, coding, and science, matching the performance of o1 in most reasoning and evaluation tests while significantly outperforming o1-Mini with 'more accurate and clearer answers'.

o3-Mini also has also been integrated with ChatGPT's web search system in order to provide 'up-to-date an...