The year in models certainly finished off with a bang.

In this penultimate week, we get o3, which purports to give us vastly more efficient performance than o1, and also to allow us to choose to spend vastly more compute if we want a superior answer.

o3 is a big deal, making big gains on coding tests, ARC and some other benchmarks. How big a deal is difficult to say given what we know now. It's about to enter full fledged safety testing.

o3 will get its own post soon, and I’m also pushing back coverage of Deliberative Alignment, OpenAI's new alignment strategy, to incorporate into that.

We also got DeepSeek v3, which claims to have trained a roughly Sonnet-strength model for only $6 million and 37b active parameters per token (671b total via mixture of experts).