o3-mini and the “AI War”

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

Chapters: 

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - o3 mini

05:11 - First impressions vs Deepseek R1

07:21 - 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/