AI Models and Tools: OpenAI’s Debuts ‘Cost-Efficient’ Model as Mistral Upgrades

OpenAI has released what it calls its “most cost-efficient” reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) model, the o3-mini. The model is part of OpenAI’s o1 series, which can reason through tasks but takes longer to respond than non-reasoning models. Compared to OpenAI’s GPT (LLM) series, reasoning models can tackle tougher tasks and solve harder problems in STEM disciplines.

Unlike OpenAI’s other models in the reasoning series, o3-mini is a “small” but “powerful and fast” model, the company said. The model outperforms earlier models especially in science, coding and math, and comes in three reasoning levels: low, medium and high for tougher tasks.

The model is available to all ChatGPT users. For enterprises, the model is available on Microsoft Azure’s platform.

Microsoft said o3-mini can be used to analyze bank fraud alerts quickly and cost-effectively. Typically, these alerts are manually reviewed, but thousands of alerts could arrive daily, overwhelming employees. The model can scour the alerts to find the top 30 that personnel should focus on. The bank can then switch to the larger o1 reasoning model to dive deeper into these 30.

Another use case is financial analysis of internal company data. For example, if an analyst wishes to prepare financial statements, using GPT-4 to analyze uploaded company data could yield incorrect answers. Microsoft said o3-mini would be more accurate because it reasons through the task. It is also faster and more economical than OpenAI’s larger o1 reasoning model.

Mistral Upgrades ‘Le Chat’

Mistral, a 2-year-old French AI startup founded by engineers from Google DeepMind and Meta, has unveiled upgrades to its “Le Chat” AI chatbot.

Widely considered France’s answer to OpenAI, Mistral offers open-source foundation models akin to Meta’s Llama. Le Chat is its ChatGPT.

On Thursday (Feb. 6), Mistral took the wraps off an improved Le Chat, which it said “reasons, reflects and responds faster” than other AI chatbots. Le Chat generates up to 1,000 words per second. In a recent coding race that Mistral posted on YouTube, Le Chat was nearly 10 times faster than Anthropic’s Claude and 13 times faster than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Le Chat can also generate images, understand documents and remember past conversations. It lets users create their own agents as well.

Mistral introduced Pro, Team and Enterprise tiers for Le Chat, in addition to its free tier. The AI chatbot is available through iOS and Android as well. Coming soon is a private Le Chat for businesses.

AI Writes Research Paper

It turns out that OpenAI’s o1-pro reasoning model can write research papers. So good that one paper it wrote — complete with math equations — was accepted by the Economics Letters journal.

The idea for the paper came from Joshua Gans, an economist and a business professor at the University of Toronto. He half-jokingly made up the topic of using time travel to make money by trading securities on Wall Street, a sure bet if one knows where to invest in advance.

Gans gave the AI the topic but with an economics twist: Whether time travel would affect the efficient markets hypothesis — the belief that all information would be reflected in asset prices, eliminating arbitrage moves, unless one had private information. The AI model completed the paper in an hour.

This stunned Gans and made him wonder whether AI would destroy the research system. “What are we to make of this?” he said in a blog post. “Let’s consider what this means if a large chunk of research … can be produced essentially on demand.”

Gans said one outcome could be the reversal of the research process. Typically, it starts with an interesting idea that leads to more research about the topic. Then the researcher writes a paper, hoping it would be useful one day. Since research can now be done on demand, the process could begin with a capability or use that is needed, and AI can research the answer.

Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain: “I suspect the direction of scientific knowledge and progress may shift markedly,” he concluded.