OpenAI has released its latest artificial intelligence model, which it said is capable of “thinking with images,” meaning it can understand and analyze a user’s sketches and diagrams, even if they’re low quality.

The main new reasoning model from OpenAI is called o3, and the company simultaneously released a smaller model dubbed o4-mini. The rollout follows the September debut of OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, which focused on solving complex problems and deliberating over its answers in multiple steps.

With o3, users can upload whiteboards, sketches and other images and have the AI analyze and discuss them. The models can also rotate, zoom and use other image-editing tools.

Since introducing its viral ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, OpenAI has been rapidly upgrading its models to go well beyond text into images, voice and videos. The company is racing to stay ahead in generative AI, where it faces heated competition from rivals including Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.

“For the first time, our reasoning models can independently use all ChatGPT tools — web browsing, Python, image understanding, and image generation,” OpenAI wrote. “This helps them solve complex, multi-step problems more effectively and take real steps toward acting independently.”

OpenAI said its o3 model is especially tuned for math, coding, science and understanding images, while o4-mini operates faster and at a lower cost. Both models were available starting Wednesday to ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Team customers.

What’s changed

According to the company, OpenAI o3 is their most powerful reasoning model that pushes the frontier across coding, math, science, visual perception, and more. It sets a new SOTA on benchmarks including Codeforces, SWE-bench (without building a custom model-specific scaffold), and MMMU. It’s ideal for complex queries requiring multi-faceted analysis and whose answers may not be immediately obvious. It performs especially strongly at visual tasks like analyzing images, charts, and graphics. In evaluations by external experts, o3 makes 20 percent fewer major errors than OpenAI o1 on difficult, real-world tasks—especially excelling in areas like programming, business/consulting, and creative ideation. Early testers highlighted its analytical rigor as a thought partner and emphasized its ability to generate and critically evaluate novel hypotheses—particularly within biology, math, and engineering contexts.

OpenAI o4-mini is a smaller model optimized for fast, cost-efficient reasoning—it achieves remarkable performance for its size and cost, particularly in math, coding, and visual tasks. It is the best-performing benchmarked model on AIME 2024 and 2025. In expert evaluations, it also outperforms its predecessor, o3‑mini, on non-STEM tasks as well as domains like data science. Thanks to its efficiency, o4-mini supports significantly higher usage limits than o3, making it a strong high-volume, high-throughput option for questions that benefit from reasoning.

External expert evaluators rated both models as demonstrating improved instruction following and more useful, verifiable responses than their predecessors, thanks to improved intelligence and the inclusion of web sources. Compared to previous iterations of our reasoning models, these two models should also feel more natural and conversational, especially as they reference memory and past conversations to make responses more personalized and relevant.

Thinking with Images

For the first time, these models can integrate images directly into their chain of thought. They don’t just see an image—they think with it. This unlocks a new class of problem-solving that blends visual and textual reasoning, reflected in their state-of-the-art performance across multimodal benchmarks.

People can upload a photo of a whiteboard, a textbook diagram, or a hand-drawn sketch, and the model can interpret it—even if the image is blurry, reversed, or low quality. With tool use, the models can manipulate images on the fly—rotating, zooming, or transforming them as part of their reasoning process.

These models deliver best-in-class accuracy on visual perception tasks, enabling it to solve questions that were previously out of reach. Check out OpenAI’s visual reasoning research blog⁠ to learn more.

OpenAI: What's Next

Today's updates reflect the direction OpenAI models are heading in: They’re converging the specialized reasoning capabilities of the o-series with more of the natural conversational abilities and tool use of the GPT‑series. By unifying these strengths, their future models will support seamless, natural conversations alongside proactive tool use and advanced problem-solving.

In other Related News: OpenAI is in talks to to acquire Windsurf, an AI coding startup, for roughly $3 Billion.