The end of the year 2024 has brought reckonings for artificial intelligence, as industry insiders feared progress toward even more intelligent AI is slowing down. But OpenAI’s o3 model, announced just last week, has sparked a fresh wave of excitement and debate, and suggests big improvements are still to come in 2025 and beyond. This model, announced for safety testing among researchers, but not yet released publicly, achieved an impressive score on the important ARC metric. The benchmark was created by François Chollet, a renowned AI researcher and creator of the Keras deep learning framework, and is specifically designed to measure a model’s ability to handle novel, intelligent tasks. As such, it provides a meaningful gauge of progress toward truly intelligent AI systems. Notably, o3 scored 75.7% on the ARC benchmark under standard compute conditions and 87.5% using high compute, significantly surpassing previous state-of-the-art results, such as the 53% scored by Claude 3.5. This achievement by o3 represents a surprising advancement, according to Chollet, who had been a critic of the ability of large language models (LLMs) to achieve this sort of intelligence.

Full analysis : Five breakthroughs that make OpenAI’s o3 a turning point for AI — and one big challenge.