o4-mini
OpenAIReasoning ModelProprietaryOpenAI's cost-efficient reasoning model. Brings chain-of-thought reasoning at a fraction of o3's cost, ideal for applications that need reasoning without the premium price.
Abilities
Use Cases
Available in Tools
Availability
How to Use
Pros
- Much cheaper than o3 — 9x less for input tokens while retaining strong reasoning
- Strong reasoning capabilities for its price point
- Supports tool use and vision — versatile for multi-modal reasoning tasks
- Good for most coding tasks that require step-by-step reasoning
Cons
- Weaker than o3 on the hardest problems — reduced accuracy on frontier benchmarks
- Still slower than non-reasoning models due to chain-of-thought processing
- Closed source — no transparency into reasoning process
- Reasoning tokens add to cost — actual spend can exceed headline pricing
What to Use It For
Perfect For
Combines chain-of-thought analysis with code generation at 9x lower cost than o3
Reasoning engine handles multi-step problems well without o3 premium pricing
Best cost-to-reasoning-quality ratio for production reasoning pipelines
Good For
Chain-of-thought helps identify subtle bugs and logic errors in code
Can explain step-by-step solutions to math and science problems affordably
Not Recommended
Reasoning depth is insufficient for the most challenging competition-grade mathematics
Try instead: o3
Chain-of-thought adds unnecessary latency and cost for straightforward queries
Try instead: GPT-4o Mini
Do Not Use For
Reasoning overhead makes response times too slow for interactive conversations
Try instead: GPT-4o Mini
Reasoning tokens significantly inflate costs at scale compared to non-reasoning models
Try instead: DeepSeek V3