o3-mini is here, and yes, I’ve read the paper in full - 2 hours after release, and even the post-launch Reddit AMA. Some epic details like a FrontierMath score that made me double-take, a likely new Cursor favorite, bio risk expertise and a cost-comparison with Deepseek R1., But does it perform on basic reasoning - let’s find out. Plus, arguably the bigger story - the increasingly frenetic rhetoric coming out of the West - and Dario Amodei and Alexandr Wang (CEOs of Anthropic and Scale AI respectively) in particular. The last thing we need is an “AI War”. https://wandb.me/simple-bench (Colab): https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1AVijcPnEkl8Gy_754XbRdG5m7Q5-9slg?usp=sharing AI Insiders ($9!): https://www.patreon.com/AIExplained Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction 00:45 - o3 mini 05:11 - First impressions vs Deepseek R1 07:22 - 10x Scale, o3-mini System Card, Amodei Essay, bitcoin wallets… 12:40 - Simple Competition Finale 13:03 - Clips and Final Thoughts on the “AI War” O3-mini: https://openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/ Paper: https://cdn.openai.com/o3-mini-system-card.pdf Amodei Essay: https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls?s=09 FrontierMath wild stat:https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04872 Sam Altman Channels Napoleon: https://x.com/sama/status/1883185690508488934 Altman ‘pulls up releases’: https://x.com/sama/status/1884066337103962416 “AI War” by Wang: https://scale.com/blog/win-the-ai-war Anthropic Original Views on Capabilities: https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety AI Insider Cost Comparison:https://x.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1884676245922934788 Deepseek R1 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12948 R1, o3-mini Price Comparison: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/openai-launches-o3-mini-its-latest-reasoning-model/ Semianalysis on $1.3M deepseek salaries, and them falling behind as ‘the time gap to match US capabilities increases’: https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/ OpenAI Valuation: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-30/openai-in-talks-to-raise-funding-at-340-billion-value-wsj-says?srnd=phx-ai Wang Clip: https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1867700453494206883 Amodei Clip: https://x.com/ai_ctrl/status/1884951111771001188 https://simple-bench.com/ AI Insiders ($9!): https://www.patreon.com/AIExplained Non-hype Newsletter: https://signaltonoise.beehiiv.com/ Podcast: https://aiexplainedopodcast.buzzsprout.com/