o1 is in beta. Access limited to developers on tier 5.
OpenAI o1-mini is a cost-efficient reasoning model. o1-mini excels at STEM, especially math and coding—nearly matching the performance of OpenAI o1 on evaluation benchmarks such as AIME and Codeforces. We expect o1-mini will be a faster, cost-effective model for applications that require reasoning without broad world knowledge.
It is 80% cheaper than OpenAI o1-preview.
Advice on prompting
This model perform best with straightforward prompts. Some prompt engineering techniques, like few-shot prompting or instructing the model to "think step by step," may not enhance performance and can sometimes hinder it. Here are some best practices:
- Keep prompts simple and direct: The models excel at understanding and responding to brief, clear instructions without the need for extensive guidance.
- Avoid chain-of-thought prompts: Since these models perform reasoning internally, prompting them to "think step by step" or "explain your reasoning" is unnecessary.
- Use delimiters for clarity: Use delimiters like triple quotation marks, XML tags, or section titles to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input, helping the model interpret different sections appropriately.
- Limit additional context in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): When providing additional context or documents, include only the most relevant information to prevent the model from overcomplicating its response.