It's the only tool/system (I won't call it an LLM) in their released benchmarks that has access to tools and the web. So, I'd wager the performance gains are strictly due to that.
If an LLM (o3) is too expensive to be released to the public, why would you use it in a tool that has to make hundreds of inference calls to it to answer a single question? You'd use a much cheaper model. Most likely o3-mini or o1-mini combined with o4-mini for some tasks.
The same reason a lot of people switched to GPT-4 when it came out even though it was much more expensive than 3 - doesn't matter how cheap it is if it isn't good enough/much worse.
Effectiveness in this task environment is well beyond the specific model involved, no? Plus they'd be fools (IMHO) to only use one size of model for each step in a research task -- sure, o3 might be an advantage when synthesizing a final answer or choosing between conflicting sources, but there are many, many steps required to get to that point.
I wonder how much of an impact our being still so early in the productization phase of this all is. Like it takes a ton of work and training and coordination to get multiple models synced up into an offering and I think the companies are still optimizing for getting new ideas out there rather truly optimizing them.
What makes you believe that?
> Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimized for web browsing and data analysis, it leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet, pivoting as needed in reaction to information it encounters.
If that's what you're referring to, then it doesn't seem that "explicit" to me. For example, how do we know that it doesn't use less thinking than o3-mini? Google's version of deep research uses their "not cutting edge version" 1.5 model, after all. Are you referring to something else?
OpenAI is very much in an existential crisis and their poor execution is not helping their cause. Operator or “deep research” should be able to assume the role of a Pro user, run a quick test, and reliably report on whether this is working before the press release right?