Competition from Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek has push OpenAI to accelerate the release of its new model, the o3-mini, and offer it to consumers who already use the free version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This new
development comes after the unexpected success of DeepSeek, which “topped Apple’s free app store and claims it had been developed at a fraction of the cost,” according to a new report in The Guardian.

“OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, reacted to DeepSeek’s challenge by pledging to ‘deliver much better models’ and accelerate product releases. He had first announced plans to release o3-mini – a less powerful version of the full o3
model that has yet to be released publicly – on 23 January, days after DeepSeek unveiled R1.”