(2025-06-17) Zvim O3 Turns Pro

Zvi Mowshowitz: o3 Turns Pro. You can now have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem. That’s o3-pro. Should you have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem, if you are paying the $200/month subscription price for ChatGPT Pro? Should you pay the $200, or the order of magnitude markup over o3 to use o3-pro in the API?

That’s trickier. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. My experience so far is that waiting a long time is annoying, sufficiently annoying that you often won’t want to wait. Whenever I ask o3-pro something, I often also have been asking o3 and Opus.

The o3-pro answers have so far definitely been better than o3, but the wait is usually enough to break my workflow and human context window in meaningful ways – fifteen minutes plus variance is past the key breakpoint

In many ways o3-pro still feels like o3, only modestly better in exchange for being slower. Otherwise, same niche

Perhaps the most interesting claim, from some including Tyler Cowen, was that o3-pro is perhaps not a lying liar, and hallucinates far less than o3

My hunch, based on my use so far, is that o3-pro is hallucinating modestly less

o3-Pro Versus o3

Give Me a Minute

It is also super frustrating to run into errors when you are waiting 15+ minutes for a response, and reports of such errors were common which matches my experience

On Your Marks

Bindu Reddy: o3-Pro Is Not Very Good At Agentic Coding And Doesn’t Score Higher Than o3

Reactions

Tyler Cowen was very positive, he seems like the perfect customer for o3-pro

Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit

This is one of the things I’ve loved the most so far about o3-pro.
Jerry Liu: o3-pro is extremely good at reasoning, extremely slow, and extremely concise – a top-notch consultant that will take a few minutes to think, and output bullet points.
Do not ask it to write essays for you

Where Art Thou O System Card