We are pleased to announce that OpenAI o3-mini is now available in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. o3-mini adds significant cost efficiencies compared with o1-mini with enhanced reasoning, with new features like reasoning effort control and tools, while providing comparable or better responsiveness.
o3-mini’s advanced capabilities, combined with its efficiency gains, make it a powerful tool for developers and enterprises looking to optimize their AI applications.
With faster performance and lower latency, o3-mini is designed to handle complex reasoning workloads while maintaining efficiency.
New features of o3-mini
As the evolution of OpenAI o1-mini, o3-mini introduces several key features that enhance AI reasoning and customization:
- Reasoning effort parameter: Allows users to adjust the model’s cognitive load with low, medium, and high reasoning levels, providing greater control over the response and latency.
- Structured outputs: The model now supports JSON Schema constraints, making it easier to generate well-defined, structured outputs for automated workflows.
- Functions and Tools support: Like previous models, o3-mini seamlessly integrates with functions and external tools, making it ideal for AI-powered automation.
- Developer messages: The “role”: “developer” attribute replaces the system message in previous models, offering more flexible and structured instruction handling.
- System message compatibility: Azure OpenAI Service maps the legacy system message to developer message to ensure seamless backward compatibility.
- Continued strength on coding, math, and scientific reasoning: o3-mini further enhances its capabilities in coding, mathematics, and scientific reasoning, ensuring high performance in these critical areas.
With these improvements in speed, control, and cost-efficiency, o3-mini is optimized for enterprise AI solutions, enabling businesses to scale their AI applications efficiently while maintaining precision and reliability.
From o1-mini to o3-mini: What’s changed?
o3-mini is the latest reasoning model released, with notable differences compared with the o1 model released last September. While both models share strengths in reasoning, o3-mini adds new capabilities like structured outputs and functions and tools, resulting in a production-ready model with significant improvements in cost efficiencies.
Feature comparison: o3-mini versus o1-mini
| Feature | o1-mini | o3-mini |
| Reasoning Effort Control | No | Yes (low, medium, high) |
| Developer Messages | No | Yes |
| Structured Outputs | No | Yes |
| Functions/Tools Support | No | Yes |
| Vision Support | No | No |
Watch o3-mini in action, helping with banking fraud, in the demo below:
And watch this o3-mini demo for financial analysis:
Join us on this journey
We invite you to explore the capabilities of o3-mini and see how it can transform your AI applications. With Azure OpenAI Service, you get access to the latest AI innovations, enterprise-grade security, and global compliance, and data remains private and secure.
Learn more about OpenAI o3-mini in GitHub Copilot and GitHub Models here.
Get started today! Sign up in Azure AI Foundry to access o3-mini and other advanced AI models.
The post Announcing the availability of the o3-mini reasoning model in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
