Our hypothesis is that o4-mini is a much better model, but we'll wait to hear feedback from developers. Evals only tell part of the story, and we wouldn't want to prematurely deprecate a model that developers continue to find value in. Model behavior is extremely high dimensional, and it's impossible to prevent regression on 100% use cases/prompts, especially if those prompts were originally tuned to the quirks of the older model. But if the majority of developers migrate happily, then it may make sense to deprecate at some future point.
We generally want to give developers as stable as an experience as possible, and not force them to swap models every few months whether they want to or not.
— Ted Sanders, OpenAI, on deprecating o3-mini
Recent articles
- V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London - 27th August 2025
- The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
- Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025