OpenAI released o3-mini, a new reasoning model available for free and paid users with a "high" reasoning effort option that outperforms the earlier o1 model on STEM tasks and safety benchmarks, costing 93% less per token. Sam Altman acknowledged a shift in open source strategy and credited DeepSeek R1 for influencing assumptions.

MistralAI launched Mistral Small 3 (24B), an open-weight model with competitive performance and low API costs. DeepSeek R1 is supported by Text-generation-inference v3.1.0 and available via ai-gradio and replicate. The news highlights advancements in reasoning, cost-efficiency, and safety in AI models.