After o3 was announced, with the numbers suggesting it was a major breakthrough, I have to say I’m absolutely not impressed with this version.
I think o1 works significantly better, and that makes me think the timing is more than just a coincidence.
Last week Nvidia lost 600 billion because of DeepSeek R1, and now OpenAI comes out with a new release which feels like it has nothing to do with the promises that were being made about o3.
Since I have access to the thinking tokens I can see where it's going wrong and do prompt surgery. But left to it's own devices it gets thing _stupendously_ wrong about 20% of the time with a huge context blowout. So much so that seeing that happen now tells me I've fundamentally asked the wrong question.
Sonnet doesn't suffer from that and solves the task, but doesn't give you much if any, help in how to recover from doing the wrong task.
I'd say that for work work Sonnet 3.5 is still the best, for exploratory work with a human in the loop r1 is better.
Or as someone posted here a few days ago: R1 as the architect, Sonnet3.5 as the worker and critic.
This is the mini version which is not as good as o1 and I don’t think they demoed in the o3 announcement. I’m hoping the full release will be impressive
I know this isn't the full o3 release, but I find it odd that they're branding it as o3 when it feels more like an update to o1 mini.
Yes, reasoning has improved, but the overall results haven't advanced as much as one would expect from a major version update.
It's highly unusual for OpenAI to release a milestone version like this - it feels more like a marketing move than a genuine upgrade.
Who knows what's going on behind closed doors?
If I put on my tinfoil hat for a moment, maybe Nvidia made a deal with OpenAI - offering a discount on computing power in exchange for a timely release.
OpenAI needs an enormous amount of computing power these days, and while Nvidia would take a financial hit by offering a discount to one of its biggest (if not the biggest) customers, that's still nowhere near as costly as losing 600 billion.
I think o1 works significantly better, and that makes me think the timing is more than just a coincidence.
Last week Nvidia lost 600 billion because of DeepSeek R1, and now OpenAI comes out with a new release which feels like it has nothing to do with the promises that were being made about o3.